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LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


SS armas TUT STN TT 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK + BOSTON + CHICAGO + DALLAS 
ATLANTA * SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Lmurtep 
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TORONTO 





LIBERAL CHRIS 


BY y) 
WILLIAM PIERSON MERRILL 


MINISTER OF THE BRICK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK 


jRew Mork 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 
All rights reserved 


Copyricut, 1925, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and electrotyped. 
Published September, 1925. 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY 
THE CORNWALL PRESS 


The chapters of this volume comprise 

a /series of lectures delivered by Dr. 
Perv under the auspices of the 
Stephen Greene Lectureship wm The 
Newton Theological Institution at New- 
ton Centre, Massachusetts, during the 
academic year of 1924-25. The donors 
of this foundation stipulated that ‘‘the 
ancome from the fund shall be used to 
secure from time to tume the services of 
scholars prepared to deliver lectures on 
amportant subjects related to Christian- 
ity wm recent history.’’ It is gratifying 
that this course of lectures, regarded as 
a notable contribution to the subject, 
may now have the wider appeal made 
possible through this publication. 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
In 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/liberalchristianOOmerr 


CONTENTS 


‘CHAPTER PAGE 


PTS OUTWARD AMARES) ace Crue i mamn ais 9 

Pipa TST N WARD OPIRIT Jeni fae ch SV) teh Loker ee aa 

AII. Contrast With OTHER Types . . . .. 63 
IV. LreeraL CHRISTIANITY AND THE New TEsta- 


MENTO tras ctene et Ure Lue trunh, MAL) Mica iis jhe Cpe 


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LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


CHAPTER I 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 


LieerAL Christianity is a fact and a force in the reli- 
gion of the present time. It is a fact so plain and with 
implications so serious that it must be reckoned with; a 
force too potent to be ignored. No better proof could be 
asked of its significance and power than the attention 
given it by those who fear it, the attacks made upon it 
by those who would keep religion unchanged through 
the changing centuries, a closed ark carried along amid 
the advancing host of humanity, bearing sacred relics 
of a dead past. It is feared because it is real, and be- 
cause it is pregnant with mighty changes. There is 
always a large number to whom any change means 
degeneration. 

But it is feared, also, by some good people because it is 
not understood, and lies open to serious misconstruction. 
Many devout souls in the Church of Christ today shud- 
der at any person or idea bearing the name of ‘‘liberal,’’ 
as they would at a disease germ; people who, if they 
knew the truth about liberal Christianity, would thank 
God and take courage that such a movement is gaining 

9 


10 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


ground and that such views are winning a hearing. It 
is unfortunate that there is no thoroughly satisfactory 
name by which to denote liberal Christians. The word 
‘‘liberal’’ is by far too wide-ranging, too open to widely 
different interpretations; it is applied not only to theo- 
logical and ecclesiastical views, but to political and eco- 
nomic; to some it savors of radicalism, even of Bol- 
shevism. It is eagerly claimed by men and movements 
away at the other end of the line from orthodox Chris- 
tianity. Although it is thus an unfortunate name, yet 
it is not easy to find a better. ‘‘Modernist’’ has its own 
faults and disadvantages. There is a suggestion in it 
of a temporary style or fashion of thought. ‘‘Pro- 
gressive’ is also open to serious objections. There is 
no name which really fits and does full justice to the 
liberal evangelical Christian. 

This fact reflects the general situation. Liberal Chris- 
tianity is vaguely and slightly understood. Liberals 
have been poor apologists for their own cause. That 
fact is not by any means wholly to their discredit. It 
springs in large part from the fact that liberal evan- 
gelical Christians have been busier with religion than 
with propaganda for their own views of it, more inter- 
ested in common Christianity than in any special phase 
of it, even their own. But the whole Church, and the 
whole religious world, it must be admitted, would be in 
a more wholesome state of clear-mindedness, were the real 
positions, meanings, beliefs and ends of liberal evan- 
gelical Christianity made very definite in the public 
mind. 

For, while liberals have been neglectful of their duties 
as apologists, their opponents and critics have missed 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 11 


no opportunity to impress upon the American people 
generally, and especially upon the people of the Churches, 
the worst possible interpretation of liberalism. Liberal 
Christianity has been held up to dishonor, scorn and 
reprobation ; has been twisted, distorted, misrepresented ; 
until numbers of sincere souls throughout the Churches 
think that everyone who in any sense calls himself a 
‘‘liberal,’’ or has that label applied to him by others, 
is at heart an enemy of the Christian faith, an unbeliever 
or dishonest in his use of words, interested in Chris- 
tianity only as a useful cloak, one in his real point of 
view with Huxley or Spencer, or even one in mind and 
purpose with Thomas Paine or Nietzsche. 

This misrepresentation of liberal Christianity has even 
gone so far as to deny to liberals the right to be eonsid- 
ered Christians at all. A professor in one of the oldest 
and best known theological schools in America has pub- 
lished a book entitled, Christiamty and Inberalism, 
in which he seriously maintains that liberal Christians 
are in fact not Christians at all, but representatives of 
a new religion, not only different from, but ‘‘diamet- 
rically opposite to,’’ real Christianity. This startling 
judgment he supports by a very simple process, which 
has often proved useful in similar circumstances, the 
process of arbitrary definition. First he defines Chris- 
tianity as essentially synonymous with his own point 
of view; then he defines liberalism as essentially synony- 
mous with the views of extreme Unitarians, or even of 
agnostics and materialists; then he assumes that his 
definition is a fair description of every person and thing 
that can be called ‘‘liberal.’’ It is easy thereafter to 
show that Christianity and liberalism so defined are in- 


12 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


compatible, and to ery, ‘‘If the Lord be God, follow 
Him; but if Baal, then follow him!’’ If you will take 
Baal to be the Baal that he has made by definition, 
there is an end to liberalism in the Christian Church. 
It goes out, with the dogs and the other abominations. 

If liberalism were in truth what Professor Machen 
says it is, his attacks upon it would have ample justifica- 
tion. But his book can be saved from condemnation as 
false witness only by a plea of crass ignorance. Hither 
he does not know the facts about the modern liberal 
movement in the Church, or he misstates the facts he 
knows. 

This is a serious charge Iam making. But it is abun- 
dantly sustained by the amazing character of his state- 
ments, such as the following, all taken from the hook 
mentioned :— 


‘*Modern liberalism not only is a different religion 
from Christianity, but belongs in a totally different 
class of religions’’ (page 7). 

‘“‘The liberal doctrines of the universal fatherhood 
of God and the universal brotherhood of man are con- 
trary to the doctrines of the Christian religion’’ (page 
18). 

‘‘The Church of Rome may represent a perversion 
of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is 
not Christianity at all’’ (page 52). 


Elsewhere he states that all liberalism is essentially 
naturalistie. 


“‘The chief modern rival of Christianity is ‘liberal- 
ism’ ’’ (page 53). 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 13 


**An examination of the teachings of liberalism in 
comparison with those of Christianity will show that 
at every point the two movements are in direct op- 
position’’ (page 53). 

‘* According to the Bible, man is a sinner under the 
just condemnation of God; according to modern 
liberalism, there is really no such thing as sin.”’ 

‘The modern liberal rejects not only the doctrine 
of plenary inspiration, but even such respect for the 
Bible as would be proper over against any ordinarily 
trustworthy book’’ (page 76). 

‘*Christians stand in a religious relation to Jesus; 
liberals do not stand in a religious relation to Jesus”’ 
(page 85). 

“‘Miracles are rejected by the modern liberal 
Church and with the miracles the entirety of the 
supernatural Person of our Lord. Not some miracles 
are rejected, but all’’ (page 107). 

‘‘The deity of our Lord, in any real sense of the 
word ‘deity’, is of course denied by modern liberal- 
ism’’ (page 112). 

‘“‘The Grace of God is rejected by modern liberal- 
ism’’ (page 144). 

‘‘The liberal believes that applied Christianity is 
all there is of Christianity’’ (page 155). 

‘‘The greatest menace to the Christian Church to- 
day comes .. . from the presence within the Church 
of a type of faith and practice that is anti-Christian 
to the core’’ (page 160). 

‘One thing is perfectly plain—whether or no 
liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear 
that liberalism is not Christianity’’ (page 160). 


14 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


‘“‘The Christian man discovers to his consternation 
that the agencies of the Church are propagating not 
only the gospel, but also a type of religious teaching 
which is at every conceivable point the diametrical 
opposite of the Gospel’’ (page 177). 


I have quoted at great length to avoid any implica- 
tion of unfairness. 

It might be sufficient to let such words alone, to fall 
by their own weight of misstatement and prejudice. 
Nothing can be plainer than the fact that this professor 
first concocted in his study a fearsome wraith he ealls 
‘‘liberalism,’’ and then proceeded against it with all his 
energy. If liberalism were what he says it is, then he 
ought to fight it to the bitter end. In that case, how- 
ever, most of those whom he labels ‘‘liberals’’? would 
fight on his side against the deadly and pernicious thing. 
But, one after another, we meet his assertions as to 
what liberal Christianity is with the simple statement: 
‘That is not so.’’ And, for his view as a whole, we can 
only echo the exclamation called forth from the heart 
of one of our most brilliant and honored leaders of 
theological thought: ‘‘ Jesus marveled at the faith of the 
centurion. What would He do at the naive credulity of 
this Princeton Professor?’’ (Christian Ways of Salva- 
tion, page 220). 

Over against this opinion, assiduously and passion- 
ately cultivated by a group of determined propagandists, 
and thus imposed upon many sincere, misguided souls, 
that there is and can be no liberal Christianity, because 
liberalism and Christianity are mutually exclusive, I 
maintain with deep assurance and joy that liberal Chris- 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 15 


tianity is a legitimate and important part or phase of 
the development of Christian doctrine and practice; that 
it is as worthy of confidence and respect as are other well- 
known phases of religious experience today; that it is 
essentially in harmony with the New Testament; that 
the Church would be seriously impoverished if it should 
disappear; indeed, that at present, more than any 
other particular phase of Christianity, liberal Chris- 
tianity is the religious hope of the world. 

What is liberal Christianity? I can answer only as 
a witness, not as an authority. What I say will in- 
evitably be tinged with my own thinking and spiritual 
experiences. The full-rounded answer must come from 
many men of varying kinds. Yet I believe there is a 
real unity of thought and feeling and spirit among 
liberal Christians in the evangelical Churches, and that 
I may not wholly, or even in the main, misrepresent 
them when I try to say what it means to me to be a 
liberal in the Church of Christ today. 

The word ‘‘liberal’’ is commonly used in two senses, 
one of them more precise, the other more loose or inclu- 
sive. The one relates to the views one holds, the gen- 
eral attitude he adopts toward truth. The other relates 
to the way one holds his views, his attitude toward 
ecclesiastical processes and relationships, and toward 
those who share with him the fellowship of the Church. 
It may minister to clearness if we first think of the 
liberal in his general attitude toward truth, and then, 
in the second, the ecclesiastical sense. In the second 
chapter I shall want to go to the heart of the matter, 
asking what is the essential message of liberal Chris- 
tianity, its good news, its Gospel. 


16 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


First, then, having regard to the way the Christian 
looks at truth, what distinguishes the liberal from other 
Christian men and groups? Three main characteristics 
appear: The liberal Christian accepts the scientific 
method; he is chiefly concerned with vital present spirit- 
ual experience; and he believes in the unity of spiritual 
experience. 

I. The liberal Christian believes in a thoroughgoing 
and confident use of the scientific method of determining 
what is fact. 

He is absolutely and utterly opposed to all obscurant- 
ism, to all dogmatism that would set bounds to the free 
spirit of man as it seeks to know all that can be known. 
He is not content grudgingly to give place to modern 
science; he welcomes it gladly as a servant of the glory 
of God and of the good of man. Since every day, all 
through his life, he uses the fruits of scientific study 
and finds them good, how can he reject or distrust the 
tree that bears such fruit? What a strange incongruity 
in the use of radio by fundamentalists to broadcast their 
opposition to science! 

The liberal Christian is eager for the extension of 
the use of the scientific method to all subjects and every 
field. He views it not as an enemy, slowly encroach- 
ing upon the domain of God and the soul, but as a noble, 
strong ally and comrade. To him nothing is more 
pathetic in its futility or more mistaken in its aim and 
spirit than the frantic efforts of successors of King 
Canute in Church or state to keep back the incoming 
tides of advancing knowledge. For the scientific method 
is to him one in heart with the Christian method and 
spirit, the very method and spirit of Jesus Christ. 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 17 


In the combined eagerness and humility of the true 
scientist, in his readiness to follow truth though it 
involve the surrender of all things, he sees the very 
spirit Christ would have in His disciples, a noble ex- 
ample of real trust in God and in the guidance of His 
Spirit. No one can read Huxley’s beautiful descrip- 
tion of the method of the scientist as sitting down in the 
presence of Nature in the spirit of a little child, pre- 
pared to follow wherever forthcoming facts may lead, 
and not feel that he is very near to the spirit the Master 
commended. 

This does not mean, of course, that the liberal Chris- 
tian accepts all that may be put forward by individuals 
in the name of science, or that he submits to dogmatism 
on the part of men of scientific eminence or pretensions 
—a dogmatism which is often no less offensive than the 
worst variety of theological absolutism. It is painfully 
true that good scientists may be very poor philosophers, 
and our glad trust in the scientific method and spirit and 
their well-established results, does not entail a belief 
in the infallibility of scientists in their theories and 
philosophizings and speculations about facts so ob- 
tained. A man may be unusually, or even uniquely, 
gifted in observing facts and deducing from them sound 
scientific inferences, and at the same time be danger- 
ously untrustworthy when he attempts to account for 
the causes and unseen realities and ultimate explanations 
lying back of the facts. 

The true liberal Christian subscribes to no dogma of 
the infallibility of science. Indeed, it is hard to con- 
ceive anything more thoroughly unscientific than a 
claim that science is infallible. The liberal Christian 


18 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


bears clearly in mind the limitations of descriptive 
science, its helplessness when it attempts to deal with 
the world of personal values. But he believes heartily 
and unreservedly in the right of the scientific method 
to absolute control over the world of fact. Nowhere in 
God’s world does he want ‘‘No trespass’’ signs or 
‘‘taboo,’’ warning science off the field. He is sure that 
God has given the human mind the right to range freely 
among all the facts of the universe, and to state frankly 
what it finds there; and he knows that it is not only 
foolish but impious to deny or restrict that right in any 
degree or under any plea. God meant us to know facts, 
all facts; and the scientific method is our one reliable 
means of knowing them. 

The liberal Christian courageously accepts this prin- 
ciple, with all its implications. He believes in, and main- 
tains, the right to use the scientific method to investi- 
gate all facts, even religious facts, and all books, even 
sacred books. 

It follows as a matter of course, that he accepts gladly 
and unreservedly the historical and critical method and 
its results as applied to the Bible and to the Christian © 
religion. He knows that he has no more right to refuse 
to consider seriously what critics say about the Bible 
than the papal authorities had to refuse to look through 
Galileo’s glass, lest their world might be upset for them. 
Here is one vital distinction in attitude between the 
real liberal and the man who merely has liberal sympa- 
thies. The latter will welcome new and different facts, 
so far as they can be reconciled with the system he holds; 
the former will take the facts, and their sure implica- 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 19 


tions, though they break his system to atoms. The true 
liberal acts unreservedly upon the dictum of a famous 
Scotch preacher: ‘‘A man who is afraid to face facts 
does not really believe in God.’’ 

The liberal Christian trusts the scientific method and 
spirit; he does not coquette with it. His relation to it 
is one of holy wedlock, and not a flirtation. He takes it 
“for better, for worse.’’ One finds here and there a 
specious profession of confidence in the scientific method, 
which is impaired or vitiated by secret reservations as 
to the outcome. There are Bible Schools and theological 
scholars that make much of their fidelity to the scientific 
method, and at the same time assure their friends, their 
patrons and the public that nothing which science may 
disclose can ever make them alter their opinions. To 
my mind, the learned, able, and valuable writings of 
Bishop Gore have their value seriously lessened at cer- 
tain points by obvious defects of this kind. He takes 
pains to assure his reader that he will pursue the scien- 
tific method; but you learn to know that from the be- 
ginning of his researches he has known pretty well just 
where he would come out as to certain facts and views. 
The true liberal is like Abraham, who ‘‘went out not 
knowing whither he went,’’ knowing only that he can 
trust his guide, the spirit of truth. 

II. As his second outstanding characteristic the liberal 
Christian is supremely interested in present vital sprr- 
ual experrence. | 

He is supremely concerned with life as it is today. 
Religion to him is essentially, and beyond all else, a 
matter of how living men and women and children are 


20 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


to live and act as God would have them do. Of course, 
as a sensible man, he recognizes the enormous values of 
our heritage from the past. He knows that there are 
facts in that notable past which furnish solid support 
for right living today. But he feels that if one could 
discover all the truth that the past has to tell, such 
historical truth could never be a working substitute 
for the conerete, first-hand, living Christian experience 
of his fellows and himself today. The carelessness of 
the liberal as to historical fact, his indifference as to 
whether this or that bit of history happened precisely in 
this or that way—an attitude which often troubles or 
alarms his conservative brother—springs largely from 
this absorption in first-hand living spiritual experience. 
The liberal countersigns with hearty satisfaction William 
James’ assertion that only those truths are really essen- 
tial that make a difference in conduct—save that he 
would prefer to use a larger, deeper word than conduct. 
He would say ‘‘spiritual experience.’’ 

When the liberal Christian discloses an attitude of 
disbelief or indifference toward the story of an axe 
head that floated, or one of the other tales of miracle 
from the long past, that is by no means to be construed 
aS a mental bias against the possibility of miracle, or 
as evidence that the virus of anti-supernaturalism is at 
work in his system; or that he is at heart a skeptic or 
agnostic. He may heartily believe in the possibility of 
the miraculous. He may be, as I confess that I am, 
what William James calls ‘‘a piecemeal supernaturalist.’’ 
His attitude toward the literal, factual truth of the 
particular miracle tale may be, and probably is, deter- 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 21 


mined by his answer to the question, ‘‘ What difference 
does it make, in present vital experience, whether that 
particular incident ever happened or not?’”’ It is a 
refusal to become excited over that which does not and 
cannot make a real difference in the present living of 
human life. The liberal Christian may prefer to count 
the book of Jonah a parable rather than a bit of accurate 
history, not through a bias against the miraculous, but 
from an honest conviction that the book of Jonah will 
better accomplish what its author meant it to accom- 
plish if it be used as one uses the story of the Good 
Samaritan, 7.¢., without raising irrelevant questions as 
to the authentication of fact-details. 

To make prime issues out of such matters seems to the 
liberal Christian as incredibly futile as would be a re- 
fusal to honor George Washington, or draw lessons 
from his character and career, until the historical ac- 
curacy of the story of the cherry tree shall have been 
set beyond dispute or eavil. 

What do men live by? What is this life of ours? 
What is its chief end? What is God’s part init? What 
is our part in it? What is Christ? What is a Christian 
experience? What may I hope for? What does God 
want to see, in me and in the world? Those are the 
questions that count for the liberal Christian. Such are 
the only questions that count. For all questions about 
the past, all questions of any sort, are of value only 
in the degree that their answers make a difference in 
living. So the liberal thinks and feels; and he is very 
sure that he has the authority of the Master of Chris- 
tians to sustain him in that position. 


22 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


Many of us, as a matter of fact, believe that Jesus 
walked on the water, and made the dead live. I gladly 
confess that it is a source of some satisfaction and joy 
to me thus to be confident that He did what other men 
have not been able to do. It fits in with my sense of 
His uniqueness among the sons of men. But, honestly, 
would it be of more than trifling and secondary value 
if I could persuade many men to believe that Jesus 
walked on the water, and made the dead come to life? 
He does not make believers now walk on the waves. He 
does not now bring the dead back to life. I know 
devout Christians who, at funeral occasions, have re- 
quested the officiating minister not to read the account 
of the raising of Lazarus, lest it set going in the heart of 
some one the painful query, ‘‘He did that for them; 
why not for me?”’ 

Other things Jesus did that he does still. Jesus 
saved men from sin. He set them free from their fears. 
He made them see God. He brought them to God and 
to eternal life. These things He does now. These facts 
are vital, are primary, are of absolute value, as no non- 
repeatable miracle-story, centuries distant, can ever be. 
If the liberal is indifferent or careless as to the his- 
toricity of the far away miraculous, it is only because 
his eyes are so focussed on that which makes a difference 
in the present living of life, that not much interest is 
left for what lies outside that field of vision. I hope it 
will not seem an invidious remark when I say that one 
chief reason why the liberal Christian is less concerned 
than his conservative brother over questions of accuracy 
of detail in stories from the past is that he brings not 
a less, but a more, direct religious interest to bear upon 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 23 


them and is too deeply concerned with the lives of living 
folk to care very greatly for anything that affects them 
so slightly. 

Til. A third outstanding characteristic of the general 
attitude of the liberal Christian in his view of truth is 
this: He belteves in the essential wmty of spiritual ex- 
perrence. 

He accepts the principle of continuity and refuses to 
believe that human life has ever been, or ever will be, 
essentially different from what it is now. To his view 
there is no ‘‘great gulf fixed’’ between one age and 
another, one set of folk and another. He builds his 
theology on the essential invariability of the phenomena 
in spiritual life as truly as the scientist builds his science 
on the invariability of phenomena in nature. He reads 
his sacred book, and says of the God found there, ‘‘ This 
God is our God’’; and he is quite sure that God was 
then just what He is now. All that he can find out 
about God from His living activities, and from life as 
it goes on in and around him, applies to ancient times, 
in his estimation, no less than to modern. 

When I was a boy I accepted implicitly the dictum 
that the people of the Bible were very different from 
the rest of mankind. Their experiences were radically 
different from any which we may have. They actually 
heard God speak; they saw Him act. He dealt with 
them at closer range than He deals with us. That was 
their distinction; and proofs were offered that God was 
thus superlatively with them. It constitutes a wonderful 
advance into deeper phases of reality to move forward 
from that state of mind to a conviction that life for the 
people of the Bible was essentially like ours, their experi- 


24 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


ences similar to our own; that we may know God as they 
did; that the differences which used to seem so marked 
were very largely due to different ways of regarding the 
same facts, the primitive Oriental mind seeing and in- 
terpreting God and life in styles of thought that our 
scientific age does not and cannot use. One begins to 
wonder if even outward events in the method of their 
occurrence were so very- different then and now. Sta- 
tion a modern scientist at the Red Sea when Israel 
passed over, and you would probably get from him a 
thoroughly natural account of its passage. On the 
other hand set a Hebrew poet alongside Washington 
as he withdraws his little army from Long Island 
to Manhattan under cover of an opportune fog; or with 
Dr. Grenfell on the occasion of his rescue from the ice 
floe; and you would have as forthright a ne story 
as any in the Old Testament. 

But whatever may be true of outward happenings— 
and the liberal Christian may heartily believe in the 
occurrence of miracles as narrated in the Bible, finding 
in them natural concessions to a childish age—the liberal 
is sure that the spiritual experience of man has been 
essentially the same in all the ages. He says with the 
apostle that ‘‘Elijah was a man of like passions with 
us.’’ He is quite sure that the men of Bible days and 
Bible scenes had not only essentially the same life to 
live, the same problems to face, but also the same ways 
to work them out, the same spiritual resources on which 
to draw, that we have. Life is one in all vital matters. 
The things that matter most in the Bible are the things 
that are as true for us as for the men of Bible times. 

Here emerges and stands clear a striking difference 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 25 


between the liberal and the ultra-conservative, or fun- 
damentalist Christian. The fundamentalist lives in a 
night between two days. The times of the Bible were 
times of daylight; God could be seen and heard plainly. 
The ‘‘ Millennial Dawn’’ will usher in another day, when 
Christ will be visibly at hand, and men will see and 
hear and know God vividly and actually, as of old. 
But now we are between sunset and dawn, in a long and 
dark night, lighted only by faint glimmers from the 
Holy Spirit. The supernatural has withdrawn in large 
part from us; we grope in the natural world. 

But the liberal ‘‘sees life whole.’’ He is sure that 
the light of life vouchsafed to us is as bright and clear 
as the light in which the saints walked in Jerusalem 
and Galilee. He dares believe that experiences with 
Christ are open to us which may be one with those of 
Paul. The setting and description of fact and form 
may differ; the vital nature of the experience is the 
same. 

From this difference in view proceeds a characteristic 
and marked distinction between the attitudes of the 
liberal and the conservative (or fundamentalist) toward 
the discovery of likenesses between Biblical facts and 
the facts of our day, or toward interpretations which 
tend to treat Bible life as very like our normal life. 
Such discoveries and interpretations delight the liberal, 
but distress the fundamentalist. For the one to whom 
religion is essentially a marvel from outside, something 
to be attached to, or imposed upon, our natural life, 
religion is weakened and lessened in the degree that the 
Bible is revealed as less miraculous and more normal. 
But the one to whom religion is essentially the living 


26 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


with God of our normal life finds more of religious 
value in the Bible emerging with every discovery or 
interpretation that brings Bible characters and events 
more nearly. into conformity with life as we know it. 

In all the Bible the liberal Christian can find no text 
better suited to be his motto than the great word of 
Paul: ‘‘The life that I now live in the flesh I live by the 
faith of the Son of God.”’ 

These seem to be the three outstanding characteristics 
of the liberal Christian in his view of the truth about 
God and life: he accepts the scientific method; he 
cares supremely about present vital spiritual experience, 
and he is sure of the essential unity of spiritual experi- 
ence, past, present and to come. We might sum it up 
by saying that he has a controlling passion for reality. 
I hope in the next chapter to set this forth in a way 
still more accurate and effective. 

But, as we have said, the word “‘liberal’’ is used not 
only in the foregoing sense, but also to characterize a 
general attitude toward fellow truth-seekers. And we 
would not be doing full justice to the word, or to many 
who deserve to be included in the ranks of ‘‘liberal 
Christians,’’ if we did not make the meaning clear also 
of ‘‘liberal’’ in this practical and ecclesiastical sense. 

A man may be a convinced conservative in his personal 
theological views, and yet be, in a very real sense of 
the word, a truly liberal Christian. For in the ranks 
of that strong and growing party in the Church are 
many who, though conservative or even fundamentalist 
in their theology, are liberal in their ecclesiastical atti- 
tude and action. 

At a recent ecclesiastical gathering, where lines were 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 27 


sharply drawn, and party spirit ran high, a man re- 
marked to me, “‘I’m a fundamentalist, and I’m a pre- 
millennarian ; but I won’t let anyone tell me what I have 
got to believe.’? That man was a liberal in a very real 
sense, and quite without knowing it. 

What are the characteristic marks of liberal Chris- 
tianity, in this more inclusive sense? 

irst of all, the liberal Christian is one who keeps an 
open mind toward truth.) I do not mean that he keeps 
it open at both ends, so that it leaks. Nor need he 
pull down his walls. But he does not pull down the 
shades. He keeps his mental windows open. 

That is to say, he refuses to admit to himself that any 
question is ever irrevocably settled. There are no doc- © 
trines, no experiences, no matters of any sort, in the } 
presence of which he closes his eyes, and refuses to 
think, or to consider new evidence seriously offered. 
This does not mean that the liberal Christian has no 
decided opinions or convictions. He may be very sure 
of some truths, so very sure that in his heart he is 
serenely confident that never can they be disproved for 
him. But even these he will gladly set out in the sun- 
light for all men to see and examine. Even these he 
will hold subject to review, if what purports to be new 
evidence of real worth is produced. He will hold to his 
views, but open-mindedly, not blindly. He will fight 
for his convictions, but fairly, as a man of honor, not 
shrinking from the challenge of any honest foe or critic. 
He believes, with Bishop Watson, that ‘‘whoever is 
afraid of submitting any question, civil or religious, 
to the test of free discussion is more in love with his 
own opinion than with truth.’’ 


28 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


(‘The second characteristic of the liberal Christian in 
this broader and more pragmatic definition, is his belief 
in the comprehensive nature and range of the true 
Church,| 

This does not mean that the liberal Christian is not 
in any sense a partisan. It would be quite too much to 
claim exemption for him from that common virtue, or 
vice, of humanity. He may hold his own views tena- 
ciously, and defend them vigorously, and still be a 
liberal. 

But emphatically he does not want the Church re- 
stricted to any one type of thought or experience, not 
even his own type. He feels that such restriction would 
be an impoverishment, not a gain. He desires to see 
the Church grow into a unity of faith and love, but 
his is a dream totally different from that of the fanatic 
who sees the whole world at last converted to his own 
particular variety of opinion, so that thought and opin- 
ion shall be uniform. The liberal would count that a 
curse, not a blessing. Whatever his own views may be, 
and however proudly or tightly he may hold them, he 
wants the Church, his Church, to be broad enough to 
include not only all who hold those views, but all who 
do not, and who nevertheless have undoubted Christian 
faith, as proved by its fruits; all who have real Chris- 
tian experience of soul, and good motives and purposes 
for the service of God and His Kingdom. 

Tt follows that the liberal desires to make the Church 
as broad and inclusive as he can, while the man at the 
other extreme endeavors to make the Church as narrow 
and exclusive as he can. The liberal would rather err 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS 29 


by keeping some in who should be out, than by keeping 
any out who should be in. 

(The third outstanding characteristic of the practical 
liberal is his trust in spirit and truth, rather than in 
authority and foree.] 

This is true of the basis on which his own faith and 
practice is built. He rests on spiritual conviction, rather 
than on compulsion of logic or of ecclesiastical au- 
thority. fw hy does he believe on Christ 2) Not because 
the Church commands him to do so; nor because his 
mind is confronted with irrefutable proofs; but/because 
his soul in experience finds Christ not only trustworthy, 
but irresistible] So it is that the Bible claims him, and 
speaks to him with divine authority. It is for the reason 
stated with majestic simplicity in the Westminster Con- 
fession of Faith. After pointing out that the testimony 
of the Church may well move us to high regard for the 
Seriptures, and that the many excellencies of the Bible, 
and its ‘‘entire perfection’’ may well be received as evi- 
dence of its being the Word of God, that Confession 
goes on to say, ‘‘ Yet, notwithstanding, our full persua-— 
sion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine 
authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy 
Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our 
hearts.’’ 

It is equally true of the liberal Christian in his atti- 
tude to truth in general and to authority in general, 
that he rests fully and wholly on spirit, not on force; 
on truth, not on dogma. He trusts for the triumph of 
the truth in which he believes, or of the party to which 
he belongs, to free speech, clear argument, free judg- 


30 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


ment; not to ecclesiastical process, or dogmatic asser- 
tion. 

During the past few years some talk has been heard 
about ‘‘liberal propaganda.’’ Charges have been made 
that liberals were trying to capture the Church, trying 
to advance their cause to victory through controlling 
or conquering the conservative forces by some eccle- 
slastical process. But it should always be borne in mind 
that one of the very conspicuous differences between lib- 
eral and fundamentalist propaganda is that the attitude 
of the fundamentalists toward their fellow truth-seekers 
permits the aggressive use of ecclesiastical weapons, and 
the attitude of the liberals does not. It is so evident 
that no one can successfully deny—probably no one 
would attempt to deny—that the fundamentalist groups 
have been using ecclesiastical processes wherever pos- 
sible to make their view and their party the authorita- 
tive view and the controlling party, and to drive liberals 
out of the Church. So far as I am aware, no liberal 
anywhere, individual or group, has made the slightest 
effort to use ecclesiastical weapons for the disfranchise- 
ment of any conservative, or for the restriction of his 
liberty of thought or action. Liberals ask only freedom 
to say what they think, and to have a fair field and no 
favor, with the conscience of the Christian public as 
the judge. They appeal, as Paul did, to ‘‘every man’s 
conscience in the sight of God.’’ 

An appeal to ecclesiastical authority or process in 
support of his beliefs would be, for any liberal, dis- 
loyalty to one of his fundamental convictions, which is 
that truth, not authority, spirit, not force, should be 
the final arbiter in whose hands the decision should rest. 


ITS OUTWARD MARKS ol 


This is a hasty sketch of the outward marks of liberal 
Christianity. Yet I trust it may not wholly fail to show 
something of its value and beauty. It will be obvious 
to any thoughtful mind that there are dangers attendant 
upon such a position and attitude. The liberal Chris- 
tian needs to be on guard continually, watching and 
praying lest his very virtues run him into excesses, and 
lest he sin at unguarded moments—drop into looseness, 
indifference and indolence, or easy-going contentment 
with that which claims to be ‘‘normal’’ but may in 
reality be only low, cheap, and easy. We have com- 
pared the liberal Christian to Abraham who ‘‘went out 
not knowing whither he was going.’’ But the liberal 
should beware lest he conform rather to the picture 
drawn by the backwoods preacher, who misquoted the 
text thus: ‘‘Abraham went out, not knowing whether 
he was goin’ or not.”’ 

But the dangers attendant upon the liberal Christian 
position are just such as Americans and Christians are 
accustomed to face; such as true Americans and true 
Christians accept as part of the price they must pay 
for freedom. It is a great thing to be free. ‘‘Stand 
fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made 
us free.’’ ‘‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
shall make you free.’’ It is a great thing to be liberal 
Christians, ‘‘not afraid to open our eyes in the pres- 
ence of facts, nor ashamed to close our eyes in the pres- 
ence of God’’; and yet never surer of God, never nearer 
to Him, than when, open-eyed, we look through nature 
and life fearlessly and eagerly to the God Whose hands 
‘‘reach through nature, moulding men.’’ 


CHAPTER II 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 


In the preceding chapter we looked at liberal Chris- 
tianity from the outside. We stood at a distance and 
took a general view of the outstanding characteristics of 
the liberal Christian, as a factor in the Church, and as 
distinguished by certain mental and practical attitudes. 

Something more important remains to be done, if 
we would have a just and generous understanding of 
what liberal Christianity really is. We must ask to 
be taken into its heart in order to find the secret of the 
faith by which and in which it lives and works. What 
is the real basis of the religion of liberal Christians? 
Have they a genuine Gospel to preach, a religion which 
is really good news of redeeming grace? Or is liberal 
Christianity nothing more than modern science and 
philosophy with a religious flavor added? 

The grave charge is made against liberal Christians 
that they have no real message to men and women in 
need; that they are essayists, whose message, reduced to 
its real meaning, runs something like this: ‘‘Good people, 
this is a beautiful world; and you ought to be very 
happy in it.’’ It is commonly asserted that the sense 
of sin dies under liberal preaching; that the liberal 
pulpit sends forth a mere humanitarian Gospel, lovely 
and graceful, but lacking a deep sense of those stern 

32 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 33 


realities which have ever been the ground of true Chris- 
tian thought and preaching—God, sin, redemption, atone- 
ment, grace. The oft-repeated charge is widely believed 
that the liberal preacher’s use of old phrases and ideas 
deprives them of their ancient and virile meaning; that 
with dextrous skill he deliberately forces well-known 
and time-honored words to mean new things that take 
all their old vigor from them. He talks of salvation, 
grace, atonement, and the like, but what the fathers 
meant by those great words is missing. The power 
has gone out of the phrases. 

If there be truth in this charge that liberal Chris- 
tianity has no positive Gospel to present to sinful, suf- 
fering, needy men, then the matter is very serious. Has 
the liberal Christian nothing to offer in the name of 
religion except a graceful use of old words, and a set 
of modern ethical principles? Is he, in fact, under cover 
of talk about the grace of God in Christ, preaching 
self-righteousness and humanitarianism ? 

I think it must be admitted that liberal preaching is 
not so sharp and exact in its terminology as the older 
forms of preaching were and are. This is inevitable, 
for one of the clear distinctions between the liberal 
Christian and the ultra-conservative or fundamentalist 
Christian is this: the latter thrives amid definitions, and 
is never happy or at ease until he has his religious reali- 
ties caught and caged in a formula, while the liberal 
knows that ‘‘nothing worthy proving can be proved,”’ 
that no ultimate reality of the spiritual life can ever be 
adequately expressed in a definition or a formula. He 
is never so sure of truth as when he can watch it soar, 
free and unfettered, up into the light, and can catch 


o4 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


its fleeting song. The fundamentalist keeps his truths 
in a corral where he knows they cannot get away and 
he can study them at close range. The liberal steals out 
with his glass, to observe them where they live; they 
elude him, but he follows; and he is sure he knows them 
the better for leaving them free in order that he may 
watch them in action, 

There must be thus an elasticity and even a vague- 
ness about the faith of a liberal Christian which makes 
it hard to express it in precise terms. 

It is true also that liberals have on the whole paid 
too little attention to the careful study and close formu~ 
lation of their positive message. Liberal Christianity 
is still young, and is still finding and fighting its way. 
It has had to attempt an immense, even a gigantic task. 
On the one hand it has felt called to wrestle with the 
amazing, overwhelming body of new knowledge ‘which 
the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century have 
made available, the most stupendous, overpowering mass 
of fresh data that the human soul has ever had to meet 
and seek to assimilate in so short a period. Accompany- 
ing this great wealth of new knowledge has come an im- 
mense amount of crude theorizing, hasty assumption, 
daring and eonfident philosophizing, much of the old 
temper of materialism, and more of a temper so new 
that a new word, ‘‘agnosticism,’’ had to be coined to 
express it. On the other hand, liberal Christianity has 
had to face a Church reluctant to make adjustments, 
obstinately standing in the old dugouts and clinging to 
the old weapons, and quick to condemn as a ‘‘traitor’’ 
any one who should dare suggest any thoroughgoing 
modifications of old ereeds or customs. Subject to a 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 30 


eross-fire from these two forces, liberal Christianity has 
had to fight desperately for its very life, defending the 
rights of faith against agnostic and materialistic science, 
and defending its right to think freely against ecclesi- 
astical timidity, obstinacy, prejudice and inertia. Is it 
eause for wonder, when liberals have thus spent them- 
selves so largely on the mere defense of their rights, 
that their work has been to so great an extent critical, 
negative, protesting, rather than constructive, positive, 
and appealing? It was inevitable that much should have 
to be done by way of awakening the Church to the in- 
adequacy of old, accepted views and ways, before the 
necessity or value of the new views could be made ap- 
parent. 

‘It may also be admitted, and with regret, that liberals 
have been too often and too greatly content to settle 
down in a negative and critical position, too little eon- 
cerned with a positive Gospel. I recall with some shame 
a sermon I preached some years ago on the Bible. Two 
acute, open-minded young men told me afterwards that 
they went away quite awake to the inadequacy of the 
old, mechanical view of the Word of God, but with very 
little knowledge of any better view to put in its place. 
A few months ago a thoughtful man told me of a ser- 
mon he heard a liberal minister preach on ‘‘ Repentance.’’ 
He said, ‘‘ When the sermon was over, everybody in the | 
congregation knew all about repentance, the history of 
the doctrine, and the various meanings and theories of 
it; but nobody wanted to repent, or thought of doing so.’’ 

It may be that liberal Christians are open to these 
charges to an extent that calls for their serious consid- 
eration; that they are too academic, too cold, too apt to 


36 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


look on religion as a subject for study, too critical and 
negative. In the degree that there is any truth in such 
tharges, liberal preachers should repent and forsake 
their false ways. But I believe the fact to be that this 
condition has already been largely remedied. There 
were some years in the recent past during which it 
seemed as if we had but two kinds of preachers, both 
ineffective: the modern men, well-equipped intellectually, 
but cold in heart, and the narrow and reactionary men, 
preaching with fervor an impossible theology. One side 
had all the light, the other all the heat. Physicists have 
talked much of late about the problem of developing a 
*‘eold light.’? They might have found it not so long 
ago in some liberal pulpits. 

But that situation is changing fast. More and more 
liberals are preaching a positive, saving Gospel. Now 
that they are near to winning their fight for a reason- 
able freedom for themselves, they can give the larger 
share of their minds and hearts to their positive 
message. 

Nevertheless, as we have suggested, the liberal can 
never hope to state his views with the sharp definiteness 
that marks the theology of the older school. For he is 
dealing, or attempting to deal, with life, not with the 
forms it takes; with reality, not with theories about it. 
It is always easier to lead men to use formulas than to 
make them conscious of living processes, always easier 
to get them to accept a creed than to bring about a 
living experience in their souls. It is also harder to 
check up results when one is dealing with spiritual 
processes. Liberal Christianity must be content to carry 
on under these disadvantages. It must patiently seek 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT ov 


to exert a steady, lasting influence, rather than strive 
for sudden crises; and must put its stress and emphasis 
on the education, growth, and secret renewal of the soul’s 
life. But it may be sustained at its long, slow task, by 
the realization that it is thus taking, as the best norm 
of spiritual experience, the Lord Jesus, rather than 
Paul or Augustine. 

The liberal is, as we have said, profoundly interested 
in the life that now is. That fact deeply conditions his 
religion, his theology, his message. To him theology is 
primarily not an account of what once was in the past, 
or of what will be in some distant realm, but an attempt 
to explain the present living of this life of ours, in terms 
of spiritual reality. 

What distinguishes the religion of the liberal Chris- 
tian is the fact that to him religion is wholly concerned 
with the personal. To him, Christianity is distinctively 
and above all, the religion of personality. 

The primary antithesis of which the liberal is vividly 
conscious is the antithesis confronting him at every turn 
between matter and spirit, or, to state it more accurately, 
between the personal and the impersonal. He knows 
two sets of facts and only two, one impersonal and the 
other personal. On the one hand are matter and energy, 
with all their range of interest and meaning and power; 
on the other hand is the soul of man, and all its mar-- 
velous world of spiritual realities and forces. Of the 
documents of a generation ago that read like prophecies 
of modern liberal Christianity, one of the best is Horace 
Bushnell’s great treatise, Nature and the Supernatural, 
in which the two worlds of the impersonal and the per- 
sonal confront and face each other. 


38 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


To the liberal the personal is supreme, is well-nigh 
all. Personal, spiritual, vital, real, these are the great 
words which to him sum up the meaning, scope, and 
value of religion. They are synonymous each with the 
other in his thinking. Yes, and the lofty religious term 
‘‘eternal’’ is but another expression to denote the one 
great thought back of all these words. 

When we have said that, to the liberal Christian, the 
personal, the spiritual, the vital, the real, the eternal, 
are varying terms that all apply to the same funda- 
mental fact or force or reality, we have furnished an 
explanation of certain facts about him which at times 
distress his brothers at the other end of the theological 
line. To them, there must be something tangible, phys- 
ical, material, substantial, if anything is to be real. 
Undoubtedly that is one powerful reason why its advo- 
cates contend so inflexibly for the famous five points 
of fundamentalist faith, namely, the errorless original 
manuscripts of the Bible, the virgin birth of our Lord, 
the blood atonement, the resurrection of the body, and 
the second coming of Christ in physical presence. They 
are uneasy in regard to the position taken by the liberal; 
worried over his Bible, equally inspired whether in the 
form of original manuscript or copy or translation, a 
trustworthy and authoritative guide simply because of 
the Spirit which is manifest in it; troubled about his 
faith in the deity of Christ—a faith quite independent 
of how He was born, and glad of every indication that 
He was a man in the fullest sense; disturbed by his 
view of redemption, as something done not only once on 
Calvary, but again and again, in every human heart 
that will receive the grace of God, and done in the 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 39 


spirit even more than with flesh and blood; concerned 
over his indifference to the question whether our Lord’s 
resurrection was bodily, so long as it was truly in the 
living spirit; and amazed at his joyous assurance that 
Christ is as really with us now as He could be if He 
came again in bodily presence. It seems to the funda- 
mentalist that the liberal is giving up the reality in these 
great facts when he is content with a ‘‘spiritual’’ inter- 
pretation of them. But to the liberal, the spiritual is the 
real. Matter is but the passing form which reality 
takes and then leaves. ‘‘The things that are seen are 
for the time; the things that are unseen are for the 
ages.’’ To the liberal it manifests ‘‘an evil heart of un- 
belief’’ to set so much store by physical, material, formal 
facts. 

[The reality of the personal—that is the basic position 
of the theology of the liberal. } To him religion has 
wholly to do with personal values, issues and processes 
of life. All else is secondary or remote in importance. 
The liberal Christian cares infinitely more for spirit 
than for the forms spirit assumes, for experience than 
for the creeds in which they express themselves, for life 
than for the instruments which it uses. 

This is why the liberal Christian and his views seem 
so alarmingly vague and uncertain, often indeed irritat- 
ing, to all externalists, all who are severely logical in 
matters of creed, meticulous in matters of form, or 
punctilious in matters of organization. Debate about 
errors in the Bible, or about ‘‘the historic episcopate,’’ 
or about the form of baptism, or about the minute im- 
plications of a creed—all such disputing seems to him 
a fruitless proceeding, if not actually irreligious. In 


40 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


the face of open evidence that the Spirit of God is 
speaking through a man, or using him, to say that he 
is not really a minister in the Church because some par- 
ticular form has not been observed, seems like saying 
that a glorious singer is not a singer unless he holds a 
certificate from some recognized teacher. By all means 
let there be order and discipline. But let such questions 
be taken frankly as questions of order, of expediency, 
not as of divine right. To the liberal the spiritual is so 
absolutely identical with the real that he cannot whip 
himself into any very great concern over questions of 
outward form, definition, or organization. 

This is what religion means to him—the supremacy, 
splendor, and normality of the personal in life. It has 
to do mainly or exclusively with personal life, personal 
relations. 

[fo the liberal Christian, God is personal.) And nothing 
else matters much to him in his thinking about God. 
God is the supreme Person, of whom our little person- 
alities supply but dim reflections, yet the best we have 
from which to form our impressions of Him. Forced 
to choose, the liberal would take all the definitions of 
God to be found in the theologies, and gladly surrender 
them all in exchange for the one simple, profound state- 
ment of Christ, ‘‘God is spirit; and they that worship 
Him must worship in spirit and in reality.’’ 

He is very sure that God is more like what we call 
‘‘human nature’’ than He is like what we call ‘‘nature.’’ 
He is very sure that the men who ‘‘go to nature’’ to 
find God, who think they honor God by using ‘‘It’’ as 
their pronoun of reference rather than ‘‘He,’’ who talk 
of ‘‘Infinite Energy’’ rather than of ‘‘Infinite Spirit,’’ 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 41 


are on the wrong track. He feels that no other sincere 
men have ever lost God so completely and painfully as 
have those who, to use Henry Adams’ startling phrase, 
have exchanged the Virgin for the dynamo, and worship 
blind force instead of pitying love. 

“We know not whether you are kind 

Or cruel, in your fiercer mood; 
But, be you matter, be you mind, 


We think we know that you are blind, 
And we alone are good.” 


Is there anything in the world more tragic than such 
a picture of the human soul standing alone in the uni- 
verse, alone good, alone personal? Life is a hideous 
farce unless the heart of things is like the heart of a 
man instead of the coils of a dynamo. 

The liberal Christian knows this of God—and in com- 
parison cares for little else—that God is more like man 
than like anything else that He has made or is making; 
that the surest facts about Him are that He knows, 
loves, wills as we do, and is free, as we are, only 
gloriously, infinitely more so. God is personal. With 
all his heart the liberal Christian confesses his faith in 
““God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and 
earth.’’ 

When he says ‘‘maker,’’ his thoughts rove not back, 
however, to a distant point when God made all things 
at onee. His thoughts fly to the Father, who ‘‘worketh 
even until now,’’ making, creating, ‘‘center and soul of 
every sphere.’? He makes this day, this life I live, this 
world I live in. The liberal Christian sees God about 
him, in the act, now, of making the heaven and the 
earth. He is, to use Paul’s poetic phrase, ‘‘alive unto 


42 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


God.’’ The world he lives in is a home, touched with 
the personality of the divine homemaker. 

The faith of the liberal fits in readily with any and 
every theory or view of how the world has come to be 
what it is, which is not mechanical or materialistic, every 
explanation which leaves room for the Living God. The 
liberal is not at all disturbed by the theory of evolution; 
rather he welcomes it,_as vastly more worthy than is 
any fiat theory of a God who thinks, works, and wills, 
a ‘‘poetic’’ God, in the original sense of the Greek word, 
in which the poet is the creator, the maker. The world 
revealed to the evolutionist seems to the liberal to eall 
for vast patience, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and vital 
energy on the part of its Maker—qualities all personal 
and spiritual. How that great Personality we call God 
makes His connections with the world of matter and 
force the liberal does not know. But neither does he 
know how human personality makes its will effective in 
the control of its body and its world. He is keenly in- 
terested in developments of modern physical theory, 
wherein all matter seems to be resolved into whirls of 
energy, and energy seems to draw very near in its nature 
to what we call will-power. On the other hand, the 
liberal Christian also has Bergsonian moments, when his 
impression is very clear of a God struggling with His 
world, fighting His way, hard-pressed. Yet of this the 
liberal Christian is sure—that spirit will win: that the 
chief glory of that ‘‘far-off, divine event to which the 
whole creation moves,’’ is its coming ‘‘not by might, 
nor by power, but by spirit.’’ 

Because he cares so supremely about the personality 
of God, other ideas of God fade for him in comparison 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 43 


into a place of secondary importance or meaning. Specu- 
lations about the ‘‘divine substance’’ lie outside the 
range of his interests. Declarations about God’s sov- 
ereignty, or His transcendence, or, for that matter, His 
immanence, may be interesting as speculation; they can- 
not be primary for faith and practice. ‘‘God is Spirit’’; 
there is the one great truth. God is personal, God is 
*‘Our Father’’; that is the one sure, fixed doctrine about 
God. That means that He is holy and loving and wise. 
It means that we can depend on His providence. It 
saves the soul from the terror of being caged in a me- 
chanical universe, and encourages to prayer, and to 
seeking after God. 


“Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, 
And Spirit with Spirit can meet.” 


The liberal Christian is very sure also that the per- 
sonal God is best revealed in and through the personal; 
indeed that there alone, in personality, do we adequately 
find a God adequate for the full needs and uses of our 
souls. | 

The liberal enters gladly into Paul’s thought, that 
“the invisible things of God are understood by the 
things which are made’’; but he is very sure that God 
is best seen in the persons He makes; indeed that there 
alone is He seen without distortion. ‘‘The heavens de- 
clare the glory of God’’: yes—but the glory of God is 
seen in higher manifestation in the face of a pure, loving 
little child than it can ever be seen by the aid of the 
mightiest telescope in all the marvel of the Galaxy. 
We see what God is far better in the Book of Psalms 
than through the use of the spectroscope. Human per- 


44 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


sonality is the one satisfying place to look for knowledge 
of God as He really is. 

For this reason the Bible is deeply satisfying to the 
liberal Christian; it means more to him than it could 
possibly mean were not God and life to him wholly 
defined in terms of personality. He values the Bible 
not primarily as a flawless law book, an unimpeachable 
code of ethics, or an authoritative system of doctrine. 
It is not to him, first of all or most of all, a statement 
of facts or principles. It is the revelation of Person- 
ality, God made clear in the lives and spirits of men 
and women. He values the Bible for what it is, a rich, 
glorious, tangled, wildflower garden of human person- 
alities, alight and alive with the life of the Divine 
Person, walking in the garden and loving it. What a 
strange sort of book to be the revelation of God, if God 
were first of all and most of all the Absolute, the Great 
First Cause, a theological Being, the Sustainer of the 
moral order, primarily something to be understood, cor- 
rectly defined, and apprehended by the intellect. Never 
so foolish a book if that were its end and object! But 
what a perfect book to reveal Him, if He is utterly and 
wholly Person, so that spirit only can reveal what He 
is, so that He can best be made known in the flash and 
play of human personality, of love and goodness and 
sacrifice and courage, and joy and the beauty of holi- 
ness. We know God through the Bible as we never can 
through the creeds, because there is logic in the creeds 
but life in the Bible, thoughts in the creeds but men 
in the Bible. We know God supremely through the 
Bible, not by reason of its intellectual content, its ma- 
jestic thoughts, calm meditations, and inspired bits of 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 45 


theological speculation; but because we find Him in 
Abraham and Moses, in David, Elijah, Isaiah, Jere- 
miah, Peter, Paul, John, and over all, in all and above 
all, in Christ Jesus. Was not Jesus the greatest of 
teachers about God? And did He not deliberately use 
parables, stories with human interest and color in them? 
He did not define God: He showed us God in the life 
of man and of the world. 
To use the words of Professor Deissmann: 


‘‘ Jesus did not lecture de deo. He bore witness of 
God. His teaching of God is a prophetic testimony 
born out of His inner experience. Jesus preaches 
about what has been experienced, what has been given, 
what has been striven for, not what has been brooded 
over and studied. It is not His system, which one 
finds in His words, it is His soul. His words and 
works are self-revealing; when we hear Him speak, 
we listen to the heart-throb of His faith and hope.”’ 


It is because the liberal Christian thus cares only for 
God as personal, and for the revelation of Him in terms 
of personality, that he is so cheerfully careless—so dan- 
gerously careless, his over-orthodox brother thinks—as 
to some of the questions men raise about the Bible. Is 
it wholly without error? Are its lists of kings and its 
statements of historical fact accurate? Are its science 
and philosophy unimpeachable? Is its account of crea- 
tion to be defended at all hazards and in every detail, 
no matter what modern science and philosophy may dis- 
cover or declare? The liberal Christian cannot be 
worked up to any high pitch of excitement over such 
questions. All around him he sees personality at work 


46 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


revealing and expressing itself in an amazing variety of 
manifestations. You never can tell what human per- 
sonality will do. How then can one lay down in ad- 
vance the way Divine Personality must take or be dis- 
credited? He is quite content to have God reveal Him- 
self in any way He will. 

To him it is incredibly, pathetically childish for any 
one to wish to keep the Bible away from the critics, 
erying out, ‘‘If errors and human weaknesses are found 
in it, the Bible cannot make good its claim to reveal 
God.’’? He knows well that the Personal God can reveal 
Himself only through Personality; and none of the per- 
sons he knows are free from human weaknesses. What 
if the Book which acquaints us with the varied persons 
used of God to reveal His true nature as nowhere else, 
exhibits the defects of those persons in its very fiber? 
Does it not become thereby the more faithful record of 
those personal experiences in which alone the person- 
ality of God can be made clear? It seems to the liberal 
Christian arrogant presumption to say, ‘‘The Bible can- 
not be from God, the true revelation of Him, unless it 
conform to what I and others agree in advance that a 
revelation of God should be.’’? He takes the book as it 
is, freely investigated and judged in the light of the 
best and sanest critical common sense of which scholars 
are capable, and finds God in it, the Personal Spirit, 
speaking to his own soul. If the message authenticates 
itself by its spiritual character and appeal as from his 
Father, what should he care about the sort of envelope 
in which it is enclosed, or the postmark it bears, or 
whether here or there the one who pens it has missed 
a letter or misspelled a word? The Bible is important 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 47 


and valuable to the extent that it is a revelation of the 
Infinite Person through varied human personalities. It 
is authoritative, not because it can be shown to have no 
flaw in it, but because so evidently God is in it. To the 
ultra-conservative such an ordered creed as the West- 
minster Confession of Faith must seem much more ade- 
quate and satisfactory as a revelation of the truth of 
God than the loosely ordered material in the Bible. But, 
here as everywhere, ‘‘the foolishness of God is wiser 
than men’’; the power of the great Confession is wan- 
ing, while the Bible continues to meet and serve every 
new age with renewed and youthful vigor. 

The more the liberal studies his Bible, the more clear 
and wonderful appears the plain evidence of its time- 
lessness, its fresh, vital meaning for every new age. Truly 
the Book is eternal, and that because it is the revelation 
of personality, the only eternal reality we know. The 
wonder of the Scriptures to the liberal Christian, the 
plainest proof of their inspiration, is not that they re- 
eord facts of long ago with meticulous and unerring ac- 
curacy, but that they hold the mirror up to contem- 
porary life with a startling freshness seldom found even 
in the daily newspaper. The teachings of the Bible are 
always coming out in new patterns. There is a kaleido- 
scopic quality about them. At every turn of the wheel 
of time the old bits of color and form fall into new 
beauties of alignment. Take a man who ean see straight, 
one who is no longer the slave of the conventional, and 
really knows his Bible, and let such an one gain a new 
idea as to the conduct of life, find a fresh way of looking 
at it, and then take up his Bible. Out from it will 
flash lights on that new idea, that will startle and amaze 


48 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


him, and establish him in a new reverence and confidence 
toward this ‘‘ Word of God that liveth and abideth for- 
ever.’’ | 

The liberal arises from his study of the Bible, under 
the full and free light of all that the critics and scholars 
say about it, joyously repeating what one of the New 
Testament writers said of the Word of God, ‘‘We have 
also the Word of prophecy made more sure, whereunto 
ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a lamp that shineth 
in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star 
arise in your hearts’’—a wonderful example of inspired 
insight, clearly pointing out the principle that the value 
of the Bible is in its ministry in promoting spiritual ex- 
perience, in guiding us until in our own hearts arises 
the light of God’s presence, and the saving personal 
knowledge of His will. 

To the liberal, Christianity, the religion of person- 
ality, finds its climax in Jesus Christ, the supreme per- 
sonality of history, the pre-eminent abiding and grow- 
ing personal force in the world’s long life. 

Whatever else may be doubtful about the religion and 
theology of the liberal Christian, this is sure, that it 
loses itself and finds itself wholly in Christ. If there is 
in the whole Bible one little phrase which, more than 
any other, sums up his faith and spiritual experience, 
that phrase is Paul’s—‘‘in Christ.’’ The liberal would 
move, live and have his whole being in Christ. 

Christ is to him the perfect and complete revelation 
of God tomen. Just because God is to him wholly per- 
sonal, and can be adequately revealed only in person- 
ality, it follows that God is supremely and finally re- 
vealed in the supreme and ideal man. All of God that 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 49 


man can know in personal experience is in Jesus. And 
the liberal Christian is sure of this, as of nothing else, 
that, rove as far as the mind of man can through the 
vast ranges of the universe of facts and forces, wherever 
God is found we find One who is essentially Christlike. 
‘‘God is always and everywhere like Jesus.’’ That is 
the surest element in the faith of the liberal Christian. 

What impresses him in Jesus is simply and well-nigh 
wholly His personality. The stories told of Him are of 
importance only as faithfully revealing what He realiy 
was, and how He impressed the men who walked and 
talked with Him. Did He work miracles? I speak for 
many liberals when I say that I am sure He did; that 
the power to work miracles fits in with what I feel and 
know to have been in Him. Who shall set bounds to 
what a personality infinitely perfect can do? But I 
am sure I speak for all true liberals when I say that the 
question as to whether He worked miracles is a question 
of secondary importance. If we believe He worked 
miracles, we believe it because we have first seen in 
Him one who cannot have bounds set to His possibilities, - 
one who could work a miracle without having it turn 
into a bit of cheap magic, a trick to catch the crowd. 
As one of the greatest preachers of our day has said, 
‘How small other miracles look alongside the fact that 
this man, in three short years, so lived, taught and died 
as to change the whole current of human history.’’ 
What He was is what counts; yes, and what He 1s, 
even more. 

Here also the liberal lays himself open to misunder- 
standing and suspicion of looseness in belief, through the 
fact that his utter absorption in the height and depth 


50 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


and breadth of meaning in the personality of Jesus makes 
him indifferent to problems that to the older theology 
and its adherents seem of prime importance. All the 
metaphysical questions tangled with the idea of sub- 
stance, of two natures and one person; all the minutize 
of the process whereby God could effect an entrance 
into human life, speculations about the pre-existence 
of Christ, and about the limits and bounds of the divine 
and human in Him—judgment on all these, interesting 
as they may be, important as some of them are, may 
be suspended and not seriously affect the faith of the 
liberal that in Jesus we have the supreme, final, satis- 
fying revelation of the Living and Loving God, our 
Father. On the indisputably essential points he is or- 
thodox as few have been. To him Jesus Christ is wholly 
and absolutely man, as the creeds have declared Him to 
be; wholly and absolutely God, as the creeds have de- 
elared Him to be. For God is personal, and man is per- 
sonal. God is love; and love cannot be one thing in God, 
and another in us. Christ is perfect love, personality at 
its highest. So the man, Christ Jesus, is God in human 
experience, God in man. 
“Thou seemest human and divine, 
The highest, holiest manhood, Thou.” 

One mistake the liberal Christian avoids, a mistake 
prolific of trouble through all the Christian centuries. 
To him the truth of the divinity, or deity, of Jesus 
means that God is to be construed in the terms of 
Jesus, even more than that Jesus is to be construed 
in the terms of God. Christ comes to men as Paul did 
to the Athenians, to point to their altars and theologies, 
built ‘‘to an unknown God,’’ and ery, ‘‘ Whom therefore 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT ol 


ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.’”’ Jesus 
makes the unknown God known in terms of human per- 
sonality. And at once they begin to say ‘‘Jesus is 
God,’’ and to entangle that clear, definite, human figure 
of Jesus in all their older thoughts and speculations 
about the unknown God, so that in the end He becomes 
a misty, remote figure in the heavens. Tt is as if, in 
algebra, having an equation, x equals a plus b, in which 
x, the unknown, is expressed in terms of a and b, the 
known, we should proceed to try to find the value of a 
and b in terms of x. Why, the only intelligible meaning 
of the equation, the only possibility of its practical and 
satisfying solution, consists in seeking the value of the 
unknown in terms of the known. And the whole practical 
value of the equation, ‘‘ Jesus is God,’’ is the knowledge 
of God to which it leads in terms of the ‘‘warm, 
sweet, tender,’’ human personality of Jesus, to know 
Him through the one whom He has sent. 

In this way, the liberal Christian is completely pro- 
tected from the ever-present doctrinal danger of taking 
Christ as a sort of second God, coming to earth to do 
a particular act in the interests of God the Father. 
To the liberal, what Christ was, God is; what Christ did, 
God does. The life and death of Jesus, unique story of a 
unique life and death, are to him like a crucial chapter 
in the biography of a friend, giving an account of how 
He did something once that makes us all forever 
sure of Him and of how He will always act every- 
where. 

To the liberal Christian, the very heart of the Chris- 
tian religion is this finding in Christ of the eternal God. 
God is what Jesus was: God does what Jesus did. We 


o2 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


find God in Him. We come to God through Him. We 
know God and love God in Him. 

It is here that the liberal Christian finds the true 
meaning and efficacy of the sacrifice of Christ. To his 
mind that atoning sacrifice loses in part its value and 
power when treated as an isolated event, a ‘‘thing in it- 
self.’’ It was indeed ‘‘once for all,’’ a sacrifice never to 
be repeated, a definite act at a definite time, wherein the 
justice and love of God meet. It is simple history, a 
fact nevertheless of immense significance, as Harnack 
points out, that men always had altars of sacrifice until 
Christ came, and ever since have ceased to sacrifice 
wherever Christ comes. But to the liberal Christian 
that death on the cross is powerful and divinely signifi- 
cant in a way it could not have been had it been a single 
event only—something that might have been done as 
well on Mars or in heaven as here on earth, a transaction 
to placate God. To the liberal Christian, that death 
gathers its most powerful significance from the fact that 
it. is one with the life of Jesus and one with the life of 
all humanity and with all the life of God in His world, 
tied in with all history before itself, and with all that 
comes after, intimately associated with all that is meant 
everywhere else by death, suffering, sacrifice, martyr- 
dom; above all a deep sounding in the revelation of God 
as the Father, showing how far He will go to deal with 
sin and suffering, and how absolutely He relies on 
spiritual power to save; it is powerful as a revelation, 
because it gives in one supreme object lesson the key 
to the understanding of what God is doing all the time, 
saving our souls by living, suffering, dying with us—by 
full identification of His personal life with ours. ‘In 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 53 


all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of 
His presence saved them.’’ That is the eternal truth of 
atonement. The Son of God is the ‘‘lamb slain from 
the foundation of the world,’’ and the one perfect forth- 
setting down. to the end of time, of the ‘‘love that will 
not let us go,’’ but stands ever ready to redeem, at 
any cost. ‘ 

I know some will say that this reduces the theology 
of the cross to a ‘‘moral influence theory.’’ But thatis — 
not true. It is not the moral influence that counts and 
that saves. It is an overwhelming recognition of God 
in Christ, now saving us by His present living grace, of 
which Calvary is the perfect symbol and expression. 

Here again the liberal Christian is not primarily con- 
cerned with matters that lie far back. He is very little 
interested in Adam and his first sin—as little as the 
Master was. He recalls how once the disciples raised 
the question of transmitted guilt, ‘‘Master, who did sin, 
this man or his parents?’’ and Jesus let that question 
slip by, caring only that ‘‘the works of God might be 
manifested,’’ supremely interested in present salvation. 
The liberal believes that that disposition represents the 
eternal attitude of God as well as of Christ, and that it 
should be his own attitude. Here is sin, and here is the 
present grace of God; let them come together. That 
is all. 

The charge is often made that the liberal takes a light 
view of sin. So far as it is true, it is a serious charge. 
For certainly the Master took no light view of sin. No 
one can quite deserve the name of Christian, in his 
theology, who does not see sin as the great force to 
grapple with, the taproot of all misery. 


54 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


But, often, all there is to this charge that the liberal 
deals lightly with sin, is the fact that his vision of sin 
is different from that of the older theology. The true 
liberal has a tremendous sense of the reality and curse 
of social sins, and of our personal responsibility for 
them. I dare to say that liberal preachers, as a whole, 
are more sensitive to the real sins of our day, and more 
severe and outspoken in dealing with them, than are 
any other class of preachers. Certain popular evangel- 
ists, for example, have poured out the whole wealth of 
their powers of invective against small peccadillos or 
doubtful practices, but have remained silent in regard 
to the really terrible evils of our time—war, wage slayv- 
ery, mMammon-worship, commercialized amusement, ex- 
ploitation of persons for gain, materialistic thinking 
and living and the like—though earnestly urged to bring 
their power over the people to bear upon these outstand- 
ing sins. Liberal Christians are alive to these sins, and 
believe that the grace of God in Christ alone can deliver 
us from them. © 

In line with the faith of the liberal Christian that 
religion is fundamentally personal, his view of sin is 
mainly of a wrong personal relationship between the 
sinner and God. That is, his chief concern over sin 
is not over a violation of legal requirements, a breach 
of law and order, over something forensic or govern- 
mental in its bearing. Sin presents itself to him chiefly 
as a personal breach with, an offense against, the love 
and goodness of the Father. The break in these per- 
sonal relations is the feature that most weighs on him. 
And nothing can set that right but the restoration of 
right personal relations, the personal return to God. It 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 5D 


is safe to say that the parable of the Prodigal Son means 
more to the liberal, is more satisfying to him just as it 
stands, than to any other variety of Christian. In that 
parable the son stands in need of no one to come between 
himself and his Father. He ‘‘comes to himself,’’ and 
then comes home. That is all. And the death of Christ 
is to the liberal Christian the eternal proof that God 
will always welcome the returning sinner. More—that 
He will go to any lengths to save him from his sin. 
It is clear to him that the acceptance of no formula, no 
ritual acts, can make one right with God; nothing, in- 
deed, but personal penitence, change of heart, and trust. 
What can any one offer that is acceptable to his Father 
except honest love and trust? 

Saving Faith, to the liberal Christian, is entirely per- 
sonal. It is trust in Some One, not belief in some thing. 
Of the two definitions of faith found in the Westminster 
theology, the liberal Christian accepts more readily the 
noble statement, ‘‘Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving 
grace, whereby we receive and rest upon Him alone for 
salvation, as He is offered to us in the Gospel.’’ He 
prefers it to the statement that faith means taking as 
true whatever God tells us in His Word. For he knows 
that one might take as fact every word in the Bible, and 
yet not be saved in the least by that mental exercise; 
whereas one cannot ‘‘receive and rest upon’’ the grace 
of God in Christ, and not find the truth and beauty of 
salvation coming to him. 

To the liberal Christian salvation is a very real, liy- 
ing experience, though complex as life itself and as 
hard to define accurately. For salvation is life. It is 
a personal experience enriched by an enormous fund of 


56 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


fresh meaning. It is in growing fullness the life God 
meant us to live, the “‘life that is life indeed.’’ To the 
liveral salvation is not only related to goodness: the 
goodness is the salvation. And it is a goodness full of 
joy. Were the liberal Christian asked to attempt a 
definition of what he means by being ‘‘saved,’’ his 
answer might be that to be saved is to enjoy being holy 
and loving. : 

The blessedness hoped for in the future may enter 
largely into the conception of salvation. But, even so, 
the liberal knows, as Stopford Brooke states in one of 
his hymns, that ‘‘goodness is my only heaven.’’ One 
should desire to be pure and right and loving not be- 
cause heaven is the reward of such character, but be- 
cause such character 7s heaven. Heaven is the eternal 
enjoyment of Christliness. 

The liberal Christian is very clear also as to the 
means and the way by which salvation comes to one. 
The grace of God, clearly seen in Christ, coming through 
the Spirit of God to everyone who truly hungers and 
thirsts after salvation, that ‘‘bread of God, which comes 
down from heaven and gives life unto the world,’’ is 
the secret of true life. It comes to humble souls, ‘‘poor 
in spirit,’’ willing and glad to come to God as little 
children, asking questions of Him as children do, but 
making no attempt at bargains as grown men are too 
apt to do. It may use, but is not inseparably tied to 
nor solely dependent on any formula, any creed, any sac- 
rament, any ritual. This grace of God comes, bringing 
salvation into one’s life, or wells up within one’s being, in 
response to a real, living hunger and thirst for the 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT o7 


Living God, revealed in Jesus, who draws near to us in 
the Holy Spirit. 

The liberal Christian’s faith in the life eternal is 
strong. Like all his faiths, it proceeds from and cen- 
ters around the great fact of personality. By so much 
as personality is the best thing in God’s world, are we 
sure that it will not terminate with the breath, but will 
last and live on in the unseen world. This world would 
lack meaning and dignity, become a ‘‘blot or a blank,”’ 
if death could make an end of the spirit of man. 

It is in the glory of Christ’s personality that the 
liberal finds the surest proof of His resurrection from 
the dead. He is well aware that the external and con- 
temporary testimony to that event is such as would not 
hold in any court. His joyous assurance, nevertheless, 
matches that which Peter stated so forcibly and simply 
when, speaking of Jesus and death, he said, ‘‘It was 
not possible that He should be holden of ¢t.’? For the 
spirit of Jesus, the personality of Jesus, to have been 
overcome of death, for that Holy One to have seen cor- 
ruption, would turn life into a hideous jest. 

But the liberal Christian is more or less indifferent 
to the question whether it was in the body or in the 
spirit that Jesus rose; whether it was in the ‘‘same 
body in which He suffered,’’ or in the new “‘spiritual 
body,’’ of which Paul speaks with such confidence. 
This he knows, that the Lord really lived after His 
death on the cross, and that the belief of His disciples 
that He was living and had triumphed over death, was 
due not to excited imaginations which misled them into 
taking fancies for facts, but to Jesus Himself, their 


08 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


Lord and ours, who made them conscious of His living 
presence. How He did this, the liberal can content 
himself to let remain an unsettled question, whether 
through spiritual visions, or through the assumption of 
a physical form. 

The crucial fact, that which counts, is the indestructi- 
ble persuasion that He lives, and is with us now, our 
Lord, our Master, through whom God draws near to 
us and we to Him. 

There is left for mention one more strong, outstand- 
ing element in the faith of the liberal Christian, as 
definitely distinctive as any of the others. It is a pro- 
found conviction from which there is no escape for him 
that the way of Jesus is meant to be, and can be, trodden 
by men led by the grace of God; the faith that Jesus’ 
way of life is practicable. 

It is astonishing how often, in the history of the 
Christian religion, orthodox belief in creeds and doc- 
trines, even extreme and fanatical orthodoxy, has gone 
hand in hand with practical disbelief in the workability 
of the teachings and ideals of Jesus: how ready men 
have been to persuade themselves and others that the 
teachings of Jesus have no vital connection with salva- 
tion, save as beautiful statements of the sort of life we 
may expect to issue from the right sort of belief. This 
at least the liberal Christian has in his religion, a down- 
right, thoroughgoing conviction that Jesus meant us 
to live, here and now, in the way of His teachings and 
example. 

Many of the ultra-orthodox seem to have forgotten 
that severe question of the Master, ‘‘Why call ye me 
Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I say?’’ They 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 59 


seem never to have discerned what Roswell D. Hitchcock 
so clearly states in his comment on that verse: ‘‘The 
man who calls Jesus ‘Lord’ is orthodox; for he acknowl- 
edges His divinity: the man who says, ‘Lord, Lord,’ 
is pious as well as orthodox, for he repeats the word with 
unction. And our Lord tells us here that neither or- 
thodoxy, nor piety, nor both together, count for so much 
as does the simple doing of what He tells us to do.’’ 
No one can get away from that clear truth without 
lapsing into spiritual disingenuousness. 

Perhaps the worst heresy of our day is the position 
taken by certain extreme dogmatists, who blandly tell ' 
us that the Sermon on the Mount and the other teachings ~ 
of Jesus are ‘‘not for this dispensation,’’ or obscure the 
plain teachings of the Master by turning them into 
theological allegories. A precious bit of such exegesis 
came to me recently from such a twisted soul, which 
declared that the parable of the Good Samaritan was 
not given to inspire us to kindness, still less to put the 
seal of approval on a kindly and loving heretic: that we 
rightly understand that story only when we see in the 
wounded traveler a type of sinful humanity, in the 
Good Samaritan the Savior, in the oil and wine the 
blood of the atonement and the grace of the Spirit, and 
so the whole parable turns out to be an allegory of the 
working of the dogmatist’s own scheme of salvation. 
Of course he conveniently omitted the direction, ‘‘Go 
and do thou likewise!’’ Such exegesis is evangelicalism 
gone crazy. 

All such theological fooling with the plain teachings 
of our Lord’s words and life the liberal throws aside 
for the rubbish that it is. And he is sure of this as of 


60 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


little else, that the Son of God came and lived and 
taught, that men might find in His words and example 
the way to live, and in His dying grace and living fellow- 
ship the power to live in that way. 

One sometimes falls to wondering whether the violent 
opposition offered to the liberal Gospel may not spring 
in large part from the fact that that Gospel is so high 
and so hard. It is so much easier to ‘‘believe in Christ”’ 
as the traditional evangelist presents that opportunity, 
and then go away, singing, ‘‘Nothing either great or 
small remains for me to do,’’ than it is to believe on 
Christ as the liberal Christian defines that act, devoting 
one’s life from end to end, all through, to walking in 
the way of Jesus, keeping the commands of Jesus, living 
in the spirit of Jesus, defending and pushing forward 
the ideals of Jesus, standing with Jesus and following 
Him, come life, come death, with nothing to help but 
the silent grace of God in the heart. But, hard to 
seeming impossibility though it be, that is the real Gos- 
pel, in which alone the world can find its real and full 
salvation. 

Was Jesus a Christian? On that question liberals 
and fundamentalists divide. The fundamentalist says 
that Christ could not have been a Christian in any true 
sense, for Christianity did not begin until the day of 
the cross, and the Christian is essentially one who bhe- 
lieves in what Christ did on that day. 

But Phillips Brooks clearly asserts his faith that 
‘‘Christ was Himself the first Christian, that in Him 
was first displayed the power of that grace by which 
all who believed in Him were afterwards to be helped 


ITS INWARD SPIRIT 61 


and saved.’’ The liberal stands with Phillips Brooks. 
To him Christianity is the living of that high, holy, 
loving, self-sacrificing, personal, eternal life, which God 
set before us in Jesus, and Christ saves us in that He 
first lived that life perfectly himself, and by His life, 
death and present grace enables us, too, to cross its 
threshold and begin to live it. 

So the religion of the liberal Christian expresses itseif 
wholly in terms of the personal. Religion is a per- 
sonal experience of fellowship with God. Christianity 
is a personal experience of God as revealed in Christ. 
The facts of the life of Jesus form its indispensable back- 
ground. Without those facts it would be blind and halt 
and poor, or would cease to exist. But the essence of 
being a Christian lies not in the historical facts, nor in 
the acceptance of the facts as facts, but in proving in 
one’s own present experience that God is now what He 
was then in Jesus, and does now what He did then 
in Jesus: that God in Christ is here to save you and 
me and to save the world through His present, living 
erace. 

Christianity, to the liberal Christian, is the religion 
of personality, personal friendship with the Father 
through Christ, issuing in pure, loving personal relation- 
ships that broaden to take into their embrace the whole 
world of mankind. It is ‘‘eternal life, in the midst of 
time, by the strength and under the eyes of God,’’ as 
a great Christian thinker has phrased it. It is a holy, 
loving, trustful, daring, joyous life, made possible and 
actual through following the teachings and example of 
the Lord Jesus, under the inspiration of His personal 


62 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


friendship, and through the ever-dying, ever-living grace 
of God which is in Him, and may be in us. Surely that 
is a Gospel. I dare assert that that is the everlasting 
Gospel. 


CHAPTER III 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 


An attempt has now been made to show what liberal 
Christianity is. In so rich and varied a movement it 
has been, of course, impossible to do this justly and 
completely in so small a compass. Such a movement, 
spiritual, elastic, growing, cannot be shut in a definition 
or set in a formula. But its main outlines have been 
sketched. In the practical workings of his religious ex- 
perience the liberal Christian puts his trust in the free 
human intellect; welcomes truth from whatever source; 
rejoices in the scientific method ; adopts its clear results; 
and is ever ready to re-open questions and to re-examine 
evidence. He wants the Church kept a large, inclusive, 
comprehensive body. Internally he finds all his faith 
and hope realized in personality, pre-eminently in the 
supreme personality, Jesus Christ. And he cares 
supremely for present, vital spiritual experience. 

There is another way still of estimating liberal Chris- 
tianity, which will sharpen its outlines and make its 
meaning still more sure. That is, to compare it with 
other forms or phases of Christianity. There are many 
of these varieties extant, each quite certain of itself and 
of its own importance and authority, ranging from an- 
cient Oriental sects, Nestorian, Coptic, and others, to 
the most recent cults, Theosophy, Christian Science, 
and the like. Obviously we cannot here set liberal 

63 


64 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


Christianity over against each one of all these. Nor 
is there need that we should. Practically it comes into 
comparison especially with two, at the extremes from 
each other, the authoritarian and the humanitarian. 

These two types exist in sharpest contrast with each 
other. Liberal Christianity stands between them. It 
shares positions and possessions with both, but in spirit 
and truth it is one with neither of them. We shall 
know it better for seeing clearly how to differentiate 
between it and these two types of Christian faith and 
life which are so strong in our day. There are many 
grades or varieties of both, but I shall deal with each 
of them in its extreme form. 

First in point of dignity, in numbers, in age and 
power, stands the authoritarian type. Its adherents 
make up the overwhelming mass of the Church member- 
ship. That is something sobering, if not staggering, to 
realize. Even in this enlightened age, the vast multi- 
tude of those called by the name of ‘‘Christian’’ are 
still in the grip of ‘‘the religion of authority.’’ 

By ‘‘authoritarian’’ Christianity I mean that form, 
or rather those forms, of Christianity which hold that 
the essentials of the Christian religion are divinely fixed 
and constitute an unalterable system which is not sub- 
ject to the criticism of human reason, nor dependent 
for its power and authority on spiritual experience. 
Superior to all that the mind and soul of man ean per- 
ceive or discover, they are arbitrarily and directly im- 
posed by the will of God, and are to be disregarded, 
therefore, or set aside only on peril of eternal loss to the 
soul or the society that dares so deal with them. 

Authoritarian Christianity takes two main forms. We 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 65 


may call them the institutional, and the dogmatie. 
They are alike in setting up a claim to possess absolute 
authority, to which implicit obedience must be given. 
They differ in their views as to the seat of authority, 
or the way by which its domination is to be exerted over 
men’s souls. 

We take first the institutional type. Fundamental 
here is the postulate that God has established in the 
Church an authoritative institution, which, through the 
sacraments, nourishes the spiritual life of man; and that 
out of this institutional and sacramental system there 
is no ordinary possibility of salvation. At any rate there 
is no assurance of the possession of a true and valid 
religion or of the impartation of divine grace outside 
the operation of this organized system. 

Two conceptions are combined here. One of them, the 
sacramental, is very ancient in origin indeed. Underly- 
ing it is the notion of spiritual substance, the view that 
makes spiritual life to be something that can be im- 
parted or transferred in a quasi-material form. This © 
conception goes back for its roots to the eating of of- 
ferings and the communion meal. There may be even 
dim and shadowy associations in it with the conviction, 
strong in primitive times, that by eating the heart of a 
brave foe his strength and courage would take up their 
abode in the eater. Strange is the way in which 
erude and brutal superstitions mingle with the highest 
and most mystical practices and faiths; and nowhere 
else is this more apparent than here in sacramentar- 
janism. 

Closely woven with the sacramental is the organiza- 
tional element in authoritarianism. If the sacraments 


66 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


are really a means of imparting divine grace, their ad- 
ministration must be certified, assured, and safeguarded 
from falling into the hands of the unworthy. How can 
they be thus protected from abuse, save through an 
accredited priesthood? So arose and persists the elabo- 
rate organization of the Catholic Church, and the same 
insistence is found, in modified form, through all the 
sacramentarian branches of the Church—Roman, 
Greek, Anglican—on an ordered ministry, in unbroken 
line of succession from the apostles, either through a 
historic episcopate, or some other divinely ordered 
means. 

A Young Men’s Christian Association Secretary has 
told of the lengths to which he had to go in order to 
secure an administration of the sacrament which they 
would consider valid to some 10,000 Russians in an 
Austrian prison camp. He discovered that nothing 
would so comfort and satisfy their souls as to partake 
in a true administration of the sacrament. But in 
order to be validly administered according to their fixed 
ideas, the bread and wine must be consecrated by a 
regular priest of the Greek Church, and then must be 
brought to them by regularly ordained priests of that 
communion. No other hands must touch it. With great 
difficulty he arranged to have the sacramental elements 
consecrated duly by a priest in Russia, and brought by 
that priest to the border; there they were received by a 
priest of the Greek order living among the prisoners, 
and brought to the camp. When the sacrament was 
administered, the whole body of 10,000 men broke down 
and sobbed, so overcome were they with joy and mystical 
emotion. But had that chain been broken anywhere, 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 67 


had any hand touched the sacred vessel save the hand 
of one of their own ordained priests, the efficacy of the 
rite would have been destroyed. Characteristic of this 
type of Christianity, indeed essential to it, is such 
emphasis on the outward, the organizational and the 
institutional. Such words as, ‘‘This is my body,’’ and 
‘“‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my 
Church,’’ are taken by it in an absolutely literal sense. 
Authoritarian Christianity has built immense, lasting, 
powerful institutions on its assumption that God, in 
Christ, established a Church, with an unalterable line 
of priests and order of sacraments, whereby alone the 
erace of God can properly and surely come to the aid 
and comfort of the souls of men. 

This system has long held the field. Within two hun- 
dred years after Jesus lived and died and rose, we find 
this sacramentarian type of religion in full sway; this 
system testifying of grace coming from God to man 
through the right administration of the bread and wine 
of the Eucharist, and the water of baptism. Down 
through the ages it has come, exercising mighty power 
over the souls of men. Even Luther could not wholly 
break away from its seductive influence. ‘‘Hoe est 
corpus meum’’; he hurled those words at Zwingli as 
vigorously as any Roman cardinal could have proclaimed 
them. We note the growing spread of ‘*Catholic’’ doc- 
trine and practice in the Anglican and American Epis- 
copal churches. That the channels of the grace of God 
are the sacraments, and that a ministry deriving from 
the apostles is essential to their valid administration— 
such is the view held by vast multitudes, a view entitled 
to respect. 


68 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


Grant the premises, the conclusions follow readily 
enough. One rises from the reading of Cardinal Gibbons’ 
Faith of Our Fathers, not knowing at which to mar- 
vel more, the insecurity of the sandy foundation, or the 
marvelous size and lasting splendor of the structure 
built upon it. The strength of the book is simply in 
its appeal to the human desire for assurance, for au- 
thority. It is based altogether on @ prior reasoning. 
‘Would God have left the soul of man to chance? Must 
He not have provided absolute assurance on so grave a 
matter as the salvation of the soul? Where can one 
hope to find such assurance save in the Church He Him- 
self established through Christ?’’ All the stumbling- 
blocks are lightly dismissed, or left unmentioned—the 
transmission of Peter’s primacy, the establishment of 
Rome as center and seat of authority, the power 
and right of the pope—all these are ignored and 
attention concentrated on the question, ‘‘Would God 
have left such weighty matters undecided?’’ Read- 
ing that apologetic for the Roman religion, and realiz- 
ing that it has had a sale of nearly 2,000,000 copies, and 
that it expresses the heart-conviction of a vast mass of 
loyal, devoted Christians, one wonders when, if ever, 
the soul of man will be free. He dramatizes this great 
throng hurrying along, blindly leaping obstacles, shut- 
ting their eyes, stifling their doubts, under the press of 
the fear: ‘‘You are lost without authority,’’ and the 
plea, ‘‘If authority, why not the best, oldest, and most 
thoroughgoing?’’ There was no more open-minded, in- 
telligent Catholic in America than Cardinal Gibbons. 
But his whole argument for authority as exemplified in 
the Catholic Church is puerile. It amounts to this;— 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 69 


Christ speaks of the Church, not of Churches; there- 
fore there must be but one Church, one institution, 
with one supreme pontiff. Christ speaks of a kingdom; 
but always a kingdom has one King. He speaks of a 
body; but a body has one head. He speaks of His reli- 
gion under the analogy of a marriage; but a true mar- 
riage gives a man but one wife. The perfect harmony 
evident in the visible universe must have a similar har- 
mony as its counterpart in the spiritual world. On the 
basis of these analogies, and of these only, he proceeds 
to his conclusion, ‘‘Hence it is clear that Jesus Christ 
intended that His Church should have one common doc- 
trine which all Christians are bound to believe, and one 
uniform government to which all should be loyally at- 
tached.’’ ‘‘No church can claim to be the true one, 
whose doctrines differ from those of the Apostles, or 
whose ministers are unable to trace, by an unbroken 
chain, their authority to an apostolic source.”’ 

Here, then, is one clearly recognized, well-defined form 
of Christianity that has persisted through long cen- 
turies, exercising tremendous power over masses of 
men, appealing successfully not only to the ignorant, 
but to many mystical, devout, highminded, noble men 
and women. 

Liberal Christianity offers the sharpest contrast to 
this form of authoritarian religion. It says, ‘‘ First 
prove that these stupendous claims of yours are well- 
based. We will not take the word of interested parties, 
of those committed to the system, but must have the 
word of unprejudiced scholars.’’ From them it learns 
how slender, how mythical, are the grounds for apostolic 
precedent and sanction. Read in the best light obtain- 


70 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


able, the New Testament clearly disavows the whole 
complicated scheme of sacramentarianism and _ institu- 
tionalism. From his study of the Greco-Roman world of 
the first century, the liberal is persuaded that Catholic 
Christianity has far more vital connection on the one 
hand with Judaism and its system of priesthood and 
sacrifice, and on the other hand with Hellenic and 
Oriental mystery-cults, than it has with the Christianity 
of the New Testament.» He finds little foundation for 
such sacramentarian religion in Paul, and none at all in 
the Gospels. He sees in Jesus and His religion the eul- 
mination of the prophetic movement, which always strove 
to set the religion of the spirit above the religion of out- 
ward rites and institutions. He is very sure that Har- 
nack is right in his estimate and judgment of Catholic 
Christianity : 

‘‘What modification has the gospel undergone, 
and how much of it is left? Well—this is not a mat- 
ter that needs many words—the whole outward and 
visible institution of a church claiming divine dignity 
has no foundation whatever in the gospel. It is a case 
not of distortion, but of total perversion. The Gos- 
pel says, ‘Christ’s kingdom is not of this world,’ but 
the church has set up an earthly kingdom; Christ 
demands that his ministers shall not rule, but serve, 
but here the priests govern the world; Christ leads his 
disciples away from political and ceremonious religion 
and places every man face to face with God—God and 
the soul, the soul and its God; but here, on the con- 
trary, man is bound to an earthly institution with 
chains that cannot be broken, and he must obey; it 
is only when he obeys that he approaches God. There 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 71 


was a time when Roman Christians shed their blood 
because they refused to do worship to Cesar, and re- 
jected religion of the political kind; today they do 
not, indeed actually pray to an earthly ruler, but they 
have subjected their souls to the despotic orders of the 
Roman papal King.’’’* 


Although the liberal thus openly challenges and op- 
poses Catholicism, he is not guilty of the overweening 
intellectual and spiritual arrogance that would treat dis- 
respectfully such a tremendous system, with its long his- 
tory of power and splendor, its unquestionable lordship 
over the souls and lives of multitudes of devout people, 
and its indubitable capacity to satisfy the holy longings 
of many people after God. Criticize it, as liberal Chris- 
tians may and must, to fail in respect for it would be to 
expose themselves to the charge of light-mindedness. 
Rather would they join in the kindly and generous judg- 
ment of Dr. Edwin Hatch, who, after clearly demonstrat- 
ing that Catholicism springs from the mystery cults of 
the early Christian centuries, rather than from the New 
Testament, goes on to say: 


‘‘The tendency to an elaborate ceremonial which 
had produced the magnificence of these mysteries and 
cults, and which had combined with the love of a 
purer faith and the tendency toward fellowship, was 
based upon a tendency of human nature which was 
not erushed by Christianity. It rose to a new life, 
and, though it lives only by a survival, it lives that 
new life still. In the splendid ceremonial of Eastern 
and Western worship, in the blaze of lights, in the 


1Harnack, What is Christianity, pp. 262, 268. 


12 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


separation of the central point of the rite from com- 
mon view, in the procession of torchbearers chanting 
their sacred hymns—there is the survival, and in some 
cases the galvanized survival, of what I cannot find 
it in my heart to call a pagan ceremonial; because 
though it was the expression of a less enlightened faith 
yet it was offered to God from a heart that was not less 
earnest in its search for God and in its effort after 
holiness than our own.’’* 


But authoritarian religion assumes another form also. 
Protestantism did not get rid of external authority at 
the Reformation. There remained, as a powerful and 
largely controlling factor in the great Protestant bodies, 
what we may call dogmatic authoritarianism. 

In the place of an infallible Church, Protestant 
theology set an infallible Bible. Rightly understood it 
was a wholesome and necessary exchange. Obviously, if 
there is to be any real unity in the church, any protec- 
tion against anarchy, there must be some accepted stan- 
dard to which all ‘‘private interpretations,’’ varying 
ideals, and judgments of men may be brought for regu- 
lation; and it is wise and necessary to accept, as such 
standard, to which all is to be brought for ultimate 
judgment, the ‘‘Word of God, contained in the Scrip- 
tures of the Old and New Testament.’’ Indeed, the 
Catholic appeals to the Bible as the ultimate authority, 
of which the Church is only the infallible and necessary 
interpreter. But very soon appeared a tendency to 
make of the Bible something more than a trustworthy 
guide for individual faith and conduct, and an accepted 


2Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1888, p. 309. 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 73 


standard for common thought and life and worship. It 
was set in the place of the living Church, and all that 
had been claimed for the Church was now urged in be- 
half of the Bible. It began to be urged that it possessed 
an authority which was to be implicitly obeyed on all 
subjects on which it touched, even incidentally. 

This was the theory, but in practice the theologians 
and ereed-makers laid down the sense in which the 
Bible should be taken, formulated its doctrines, and then 
claimed that the authority of the Bible extended to the 
doctrinal system thus derived by them from the Bible. 
Such a method and procedure the Bible nowhere dreams 
of sanctioning. So, while the reformers insisted in theory 
on the Bible as supreme authority, a significant fact 
about the Reformation was the number of elaborate 
ereeds which appeared; Confessio Gallica, Confessio 
Belgica; Canons of Dort; Thirty-nine Articles; West- 
minster Confession; Augsburg Confession; Heidelberg 
Catechism, and, lying back of them all, Calvin’s Insti- 
tutes of the Christian Religion. The reformers went 
far and saw far for their day. We should honor 
them for daring so much and doing so well, rather 
than blame them for not reaching perfection. But 
we ought to be able to see clearly, what they 
did not, that their daring faith in the Bible as 
the ‘‘only’’ standard would be first lowered and 
finally vitiated by the growing insistence on rigid doc- 
trinal standards as the authoritative interpretations of 
the Bible. Authoritarian Protestantism is guilty of a 
fundamental inconsistency. The Roman Church has al- 
ways contended, with telling force, that an infallible 
book would be practically useless, or even dangerous, 


Pe reer a 


oe 


74 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


without an infallible Church to interpret it. And the 
contention is just, to this extent at least, that there is no 
proper halting place between confidence in the Bible it- 
self, just as it is, freely studied, coupled with cheerful 
acceptance of the equal rights of many varying interpre- 
tations, and the Roman doctrine of one infallible inter- 
pretation offered by an authoritative Church. The truth 
is that the reformers did not dare trust themselves to the 
faith in the Bible which they began by so splendidly 
affirming. They still clung to the necessity of a regula- 
tive authority ; but they located it in the writings of in- 
dividual doctors of theology, or in creeds formed by 
different special groups and parties in the Church. 
There is this to be said in justification of Protestant- 
ism, that the best of its creeds heartily disclaim their 
own final authority, offering themselves simply as 
particular statements of belief. They affirm the super- 
ior right of the Bible to serve as a regulative authority. 
Paradoxical as it may be, the statement is true that he 
who loyally subscribes to the Westminster Confession 
of Faith, for example, and then honestly finds the 
teaching of the Bible to be different from the teaching 
of that creed, can be truly loyal to the creed only by 


denying it and holding to what he finds in the Bible; 


for the fundamental position of the creed is that the 
Bible alone is authoritative. 

But this is a position at once too daring and too 
subtle to be taken and acted upon wholeheartedly by 
all Protestants. And, therefore, we have today a large 
and strong section of Protestantism as completely au- 
thoritarian in spirit as is the Roman Church itself. Pro- 
fessing to take the Bible as the sufficient and sole au- 


A Ce AT RR EN BEN 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 79 


thority, it proceeds to define the Bible teaching in au- 
thoritative terms, and to sum up the teaching of the 
Bible in a set of doctrines which one questions at his 
peril, and must accept implicitly or be denied the fel- 
lowship of the Church. 

This dogmatic authoritarianism is a strange phe- 
nomenon, and leads to strange developments. If au- 
thority resides not only in the Bible, but in some par- 
ticular doctrinal construction of Biblical teaching, some 
particular ereedal arrangement of Biblical truth, any- 
thing like unity in the Church today becomes a futile 
dream. Indeed, the way is open to a rampant sectarian- 
ism, the logical issue of which would be a separate 
denomination for every man who is minded to insist on 
his own ereed as Gospel truth. There is a story of a 
Scotchman, proud of his name, who said, ‘‘ Wherever 
you find a McLeod you will find a Presbyterian Church ;’’ 
to which some one instantly made the retort, ‘‘ Yes, and 
wherever you find two McLeods, you will find two Pres- 
byterian Churches.’’ That story loses the grace of 
humor, and becomes a grim tragedy, if the logic of 
Protestant authoritarianism be followed to the end. A 
Professor in one of our American theological schools, in 
a published article, says, ‘‘Is the Westminster Con- 
fession a purely denominational affair? It is not—to 
those who believe it to be true. Those who believe it 
to be true will never be satisfied until it has been ac- 
cepted by the whole world, and will never consent to be 
limited in the propagation of it by any Church or 
union of Churches whatsoever.’’ 

The judgment of one of our wisest Church leaders is 
none too severe when, commenting on the statement just 


76 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


quoted, he says: ‘‘ While this condition prevails, to talk 
of church union is a mere waste of words; to attempt 
to reconcile Christianity and modern culture is a futile 
task’’ (Richards, Christian Ways of Salvation, page 
220). 

These two types of authoritarianism are closer to- 
gether in spirit, and in essential nature, than either of 
them will admit. The Protestant authoritarian will 
vehemently deny that anything in him is akin to the 
Romanist; and the Roman Catholic will look with con- 
tempt on the Protestant who rejects the authority of the 
Mother Church, and then attempts to enforce the doc- 
trinal positions of a sect. But at heart their position is 
the same. The liberal Christian detects the same fallacy 
in both, refuses to wear the yoke of either, because he 
denies the validity of that external authority which one 
and the other claims with solemnity and attempts to 
enforce with vigor. Of the one, as of the other, the 
liberal Christian ‘‘asks the title deeds,’’ and marvels at 
the weak and evasive answer given him. As weak as is 
the basis, in his judgment, for the extravagant Roman 
claims of power bestowed on Peter and transmitted to 
popes; of a Church thus kept from error through all the 
ages and therefore entitled to implicit obedience from 
all the faithful; just as weak, in the judgment of the 
liberal Christian, is the claim of Protestant authoritar- 
ians that the Bible freely interpreted in the light thrown 
on it by unfettered investigation and criticism, is in- 
sufficient, and therefore must be supplemented by cer- 
tain ereeds, enforced upon the consciences of Christians 
as authoritative. Gladly does the liberal accept the 
great creeds of the Church as noble attempts to give ex- 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 77 


pression to spiritual experience, and to register progress 
in Christian thought and feeling up to the time of their 
promulgation. But with absolute positiveness he affirms 
that to make any such creeds or any system of doctrine 
divinely authoritative, is to do violence to the very 
spirit and genius of Protestantism, and to belittle the 
Bible and its true authority. He subscribes to a creed, 
when he does so at all, only in the way of general con- 
sent, and as a necessary means of visible unity. He sees 
also, with a clearness that brooks no denial, that any 
united testimony of Protestantism on the basis of dog- 
matic authoritarianism is hopeless. Who shall decide 
which doctrines are essential, which are Scriptural and 
therefore authoritative? Is each denomination or group 
of Christians to have the prerogative of the veto? That 
way lies chaos. Yet what other solution is there to sug- 
gest? No, Protestantism must abandon this whole policy 
of enforced dogmatic authority. 

The whole claim to an external and infallible authority 
rests upon an unwarranted assumption. It cannot stand 
the test of right reason, of historical investigation, of 
eritical study of sources. Dogmatic authoritarianism 
relies on sheer credulity and blind affirmation, as truly, 
if not as obviously, as does the sacramental and institu- 
tional authoritarianism of the Roman Church. This is 
so palpably true that it is hard to see how any thorough- 
going authoritarian can keep himself from being carried 
over into Rome. He cannot, save by an arbitrary exer- 
cise of choice. 

In the very remarkable and convincing series of lec- 
tures to which reference has already been made—a piece 
of scholarship which put the whole religious world in 


78 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


debt to its author “—Dr. Hatch concludes his study of 
the influence of Greek thought and custom on the early 
development of Christianity, with the clear statement 
that ‘‘a large part of what are sometimes called Chris- 
tian doctrines, and many usages which have prevailed 
and continue to prevail in the Christian Church, are in 
reality Greek theories and Greek usages, changed in 
form and color by the influence of primitive Christianity, 
but in essence Greek still.’’ He then expresses his con- 
viction that two theories are possible in dealing with this 
fact of the composite origin and development of what 
we know as Christianity. On the one hand, it may be 
urged that these additions to the Christianity of Jesus 
and of the New Testament are non-essential additions, 
and that Christianity may throw off these Hellenic (and 
he might have added Hebraic) accretions, and be ‘‘none 
the loser,’’ but rather stand out again before the world 
in ‘‘the uncoloured majesty of the Gospels.’’ On the 
other hand, it may be urged that ‘‘the tree of life, which 
was planted by the hand of God Himself in the soil of 
human society, was intended from the first to grow by 
assimilating to itself whatever elements it found there. 
It is possible to hold that it is the duty of each succeed- 
ing age at once to accept the developments of the past, 
and to do its part in bringing on the developments of the 
future.’’ 

He then makes the calm assertion, ‘‘ Between these two 
main views it does not seem possible to find a logical 
basis for a third. The one or the other must be ac- 
cepted, with the consequences which it involves.’’ 

In these wise, daring words, he has indicated the abid- 


* Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1888. 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES rh 


ing difference which may well mark a true Catholicism, 
and a true Protestantism, a religion which always goes 
back for its authority to the undoubted sources of its 
faith in the New Testament, and one that with equal 
frankness accepts the later elements incorporated in the 
process of the historical evolution of doctrine and usage. 
Such a Catholicism would be a progressive Catholicism ; 
and such a Protestantism would be a historically based 
Protestantism. They would be mutually helpful, com- 
plementary to each other; and there would be every 
reason to look for ultimate mutual respect, and a large 
measure of co-operation. 

But when the learned author says that ‘‘ between these 
two main views it does not seem possible to find a logical 
basis for a third,’’ his judgment overlooks the outstand- 
ing fact that a third position is held by the great major- 
ity of professing Christians—for men are not logical. 
Most of them are quite satisfied to get along without a 
‘logical basis’’ for their religion. Great masses of 
Christians are content to base their religion on a blind 
affirmation, which a true Protestant is reluctant to 
eall ‘‘faith.’’ In the case of the Catholic authoritarian, 
the affirmation required to be accepted is that all that 
the Church has taught, and teaches now, and shall teach 
through coming ages, lay implicitly in the original ‘‘de- 
posit of faith,’’ given by the Head of the Church to His 
authorized representatives as the sole custodians of the 
erace of God. The similar affirmation insisted upon by 
the Protestant authoritarian is that certain doctrines, 
selected as essential by decrees of ecclesiastical bodies, 
or by the insistency of certain theologians, are to be 
taken as essential to true Christianity. In either form, 


80 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


and in the ease of any such authoritarianism in the 
Church, no proof, no warrant, no ground of acceptance 
goes with it; nothing save an arbitrary demand for the 
assent of the human will in blind submission to an un- 
founded claim. 

Of course it is within the power of the will of the in- 
dividual to divest itself of judgment and submit to 
irrational claims; and any ecclesiastical body has the 
power, and the legal right, to require some such form 
of submission, of blind affirmation, as a condition of 
good standing, if such a course does not run counter to 
its constitution. But whether a soul calling itself Chris- 
tian has the right to make such a surrender of reason 
and conscience, whether a body ealling itself Christian 
has the right to make such a demand, is another and a 
very serious question. One clear mark of the liberal 
Christian is that he denies this right. 


At the other extreme from the authoritarian in all his 
varieties, we find that group of religious persons and 
institutions which we call humanitarian. 

Names are, at best, ‘‘kittle cattle,’’ elusive and hard to 
control. The word ‘‘humanitarian’’ is used here to 
designate those who in large part, or on the whole, give 
up the idea of divine authority and divine grace; who 
think of religion, and of Christianity in particular, as 
a system of ethical principles and practical ideals, as a 
matter of working out one’s character, controlling one’s 
conduct, living one’s life, by the forces within one’s own 
nature, and in obedience to the physical and spiritual 
laws that rule in the universe. In the startlingly strong 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 81 


expression of Horace Bushnell, the humanitarian thinks 
of religion as the achievement of personal character, 
with a little help from ‘‘that very excellent person, 
Jesus.’’ 

The humanitarian is deeply concerned over the social, 
civic, political, and international bearings and outwork- 
ings of religion. But God for him is wholly entangled 
in the process; a God of humanity, yes, often a God who 
is Just the ideal or sum of humanity. 

The humanitarian acknowledges no seat of authority 
save that which resides in the individual soul, or perhaps 
in the social group. The Bible is to him as other books, 
and Jesus as other grea* souls, prophets and leaders. God 
to him is pretty nearly synonymous with ‘‘nature.’’ 
The only way God can work with man, or help toward 
individual or social progress or salvation is through 
man’s discovery of the laws of nature, and co-operation 
with them. The humanitarian has a large confidence in 
what he means by the words ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘evolu- 
tion,’’ as connoting natural forces making for better- 
ment, forces we can use. Religion becomes merged in 
ethics; it is right and lawful living. A distinguished 
representative of this extreme position once said to me: 
**It is a sufficient religion for me to know that the uni- 
verse is rational, and I must not play the fool in it.’’ 

Of course there are many varieties and gradations 
in this ‘‘humanitarian’’ type of Christianity. I have 
presented its extreme form. It veers by imperceptible 
degrees from the position of the one who finds his reli- 
gion in searching the Gospel and trying to follow the 
teachings and example of Jesus, to the position of the 


82 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


agnostic or thoroughly naturalistic soul, whose religion 
is nothing more than a vague purpose and honest effort 
to keep clean and do right. 

We all know a considerable number of people, for 
the most part earnest, honest folk, who belong to this 
general group which we eall ‘‘humanitarian.’’ As we 
said of the authoritarian, even the extreme Catholic, so 
do we say of the humanitarian, even the extreme agnos- 
tic, that generous recognition and hearty respect for the 
genuine character of his faith and practice is his due 
from us who hold the Christian faith. Indeed it should 
not be hard to see that one who, while lacking any real 
trust in a Personal God and in divine grace, neverthe- 
less does keep his life true and clean in the dim light 
in which he moves, is entitled to peculiar respect, how- 
ever much we may pity him for what he lacks. 

For he does lack the very heart of religion, which is 
‘‘the life of God in the soul of man.’’ It is a terrible 
situation to be alone in the world, without a friendly God 
and Father. ‘There appeared recently a bit of verse 
which expresses this loneliness of the agnostic soul: 


“Now that the gods are gone, 

And the kings, the gods’ shadows are gone, 
Man is alone in the world, 

Thrust out with the stars, and alone. 


And his eye takes in beauty and grief, 
And the centuries coming or fiown; 
He is lord of all things and thoughts, 

—And a fool, and alone.” 


Opponents and eritics of liberal Christianity are 
apt to class the liberal with the humanitarian. The 
charge is common that the liberal, for all his use of 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 83 


well-known phrases and terms, at heart trusts not in 
God, but in himself, and in impersonal ‘‘nature’’; that 
the religion which he holds is in essence nothing more 
than ethies. 

There is, to be sure, extensive variation of view within 
the group known as liberal. That word, no less than 
the term ‘‘humanitarian,’’ covers a wide range. And 
liberalism when it grows slack does undoubtedly tend 
by imperceptible grades to fall away into bare-faced 
naturalism, just as authoritarianism glides over into 
sheer superstition. But the stand taken by the repre- 
sentative liberal Christian is far removed from the posi- 
tion which I have described under the name ‘‘human- 
iparian. ~ 

Liberal Christianity, in fact, stands between the au- 
thoritarian type and the humanitarian. It shares some- 
what in the qualities and experiences of both. Other 
characteristic, and even fundamental, positions of each 
it rejects just as decisively. 

The liberal Christian is heartily one with the human- 
itarian in his conviction that conduct is of weighty, even 
of primary importance, and that emphasis upon the 
ethical side of life is inseparable from any true concep- 
tion of religion. He is one with him in seeing in life 
a great arena for the exercise of the human will, of free- 
dom of choice, and personal courage. He agrees with 
him in putting strong emphasis on social duties, and on 
the necessity of interweaving religion through the com- 
mon and co-operative life. He shares his assurance that 
this world as we have it is the expression and outwork- 
ing of a power that makes for righteousness; and that 
he who conforms with the laws of nature and of the 


84 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


soul will be apt to find the world a safe and good place 
in which to live. 

But the true liberal Christian cannot share in the 
humanitarian’s attitude of self-trust, nor in his cheer- 
ful assurance that, unaided, man can attain to that rich, 
high development of character that is worthy to be 
ealled ‘‘salvation.’’? Nor can the liberal endorse the 
hope that men can build by their own efforts the King- 
dom of Heaven on earth; or that the calm, irresistible 
force known as ‘‘progress’’ or ‘‘evolution,’’ working by 
methods well nigh or quite mechanical, can ever reduce 
all chaos finally to order and bring good to all. 

In a word, the points at which the liberal breaks with 
the humanitarian can all be determined by reference 
to the guiding principle brought out in the previous 
ehapter: that the liberal Christian puts all his faith 
and all his interest in personality. So far from looking 
upon himself and other men as the only personal forces 
or realities in the world, he sees the outworking of the 
will of the Father in all life. Life can never be to him, 
therefore, an unaided struggle, as it so readily becomes 
to the extreme humanitarian. He admires the dogged 
courage with which the humanitarian keeps up his faith 
in himself; but in place of such whistling to keep up 
courage, the liberal Christian sings hymns to God, know- 
ing that he is heard, and that help comes from the silent 
and secret places of the Most High. His confidence is 
in God, not in himself; in God, not in impersonal 
processes of nature; in God, Who works through nature, 
and lives in the soul of man, and is ever ready to respond 
to faith. He believes that back of our life, and of 


‘ CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 85 


the entire life of the universe, is that God of whom 
the ancient writer of the Chronicles of Israel wrote so 
nobly, when he declared, ‘‘The eyes of the Lord run to 
and fro throughout the earth, to show himself strong on 
behalf of him whose heart is perfect toward Him.’’ The 
very essence of the liberal’s religion is personal trust in 
the personal God and Father of our spirits, the God 
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

The liberal Christian also parts company with the 
humanitarian in that he has an unreserved and thorough- 
going acceptance of the practical and spiritual authority 
of the Bible and of Christ. Here he approaches nearer 
to the authoritarian, and shares with him the joy of 
confidence in a standard and a Lord worthy of full trust, 
worthy even of being entrusted with the eternal destinies 
of the soul. 

It is not too much to claim that the liberal Christian 
has a sense of the authority of the Bible, and of the lord- 
ship of Christ, as strong and as practically valid as that 
professed by the authoritarian. But, as has been sug- 
gested earlier in this discussion, and as anyone who 
looks at the matter can readily see for himself, the liberal 
Christian is content to ground his faith in the authority 
of the Bible and of Christ on a practical and spiritual 
basis. Why does he take the Bible as his guide? Be- 
eause it is given him by a Church divinely constituted, 
and vested with authority? No; for he knows that there 
is no such Church. Because the Bible is declared by 
the ereeds to be infallible, and to possess divine au- 
thority? No; for the truth is the reverse—the creeds 
derive all their force from the Word of God, and from 


86 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


the spiritual experience of believers, and cannot in any 
possible way guarantee that which guarantees them. 

Why then does he accept the Bible as authoritative? 
Simply and solely because of what it is, and of what it 
does; because, to use Coleridge’s classic phrase, ‘‘it finds 
us.’’ The liberal Christian knows no other proof. The 
authoritarian uneasily asks, ‘‘But what of those to 
whom it does not appeal, those whom it does not 
‘find’? How do you prove or enforce, in their case, 
the authority of the Scriptures?’’ The liberal Chris- 
tian answers readily and cheerfully: ‘‘I do not. Ifa 
man declares that he does not find God and divine au- 
thority in the Bible, I know no way to make him admit 
that it is there. ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him 
hear, and he that hath eyes to see, let him see.” What 
gain can there be in thundering at him in tones of self- 
assertive authority? If he will not consent of himself 
to bow in the presence of God, can the voice of any 
human authority bend his back?’’ 

The liberal Christian finds comfort and light in this 
matter of the authority of the Bible in two places; in the 
best creeds of the Reformation period, and in music. It 
gives him keen satisfaction to discover that the great 
creeds of early Protestantism rest their majestic affirma- 
tions of the authority of the Word of God ultimately on 
the sole fact of the spiritual appeal of the Bible itself. 
The Westminster Confession of Faith, which stands out 
amid the Reformation symbols for rugged strength, as 
well as for persistence as a living power, takes that posi- 
tion, with a definiteness remarkable in a document from 
tnat early period. In terms unequivocal and decisive, it 
states : 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 87 


*“We may be moved and induced by the testimony 
of the Church to a high and reverent esteem of the 
Holy Scripture; and the heavenliness of the matter, 
the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, 
the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole 
(which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery 
it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many 
other incomparable excellencies, and the entire per- 
fection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth 
abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God; 
yet, notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assur- 
ance of the infallible truth and divine authority there- 
of is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bear- 
ing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.’’ 


It lays down the principle that obscure parts of the 
Seriptures are to be interpreted by those parts of the 
Seriptures whose meaning is plain and clear and not 
by an authoritative church, pope, or council, nor by an 
authoritative creed ; and while it entrusts the Bible to the 
common sense of simple folk, it sanctions also and de- 
mands the best and fullest study of it in the original lan- 
guages, in a way which amply justifies the statement that 
the modern critical historical research movement bears 
the stamp of its approval. And it declares, in the last 
section of its noble chapter on the Scriptures, that ‘‘The 
Supreme Judge, by whom all controversies of religion 
are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opin- 
ions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private 
spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are 
to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in 
the Seriptures’’—not the Bible as a lawbook, or a set 


88 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


of inerrant statements, but the Bible as a vehicle and 
expression of the living Spirit of the Living God. 

To the liberal Christian, music offers one of the clear- 
est analogies to religion in the matter of authority, as 
in many other details. No authority in all the world is 
more certain, more absolute, more universally accepted 
in its own domain, or more securely based, than the au- 
thority of the great masters of music and of their master- 
pieces. No sovereigns of any other realm ever reigned 
with authority more unquestioned and unquestionable 
than that of Bach or Beethoven. Yet on what does their 
authority rest? Has any court ever sat on the subject 
and rendered a decision? Has any council of musicians 
ever met and solemnly declared their works to be the 
seat of authority in music? The authority resides in the 
music itself, in the appeal, instant, irresistible, per- 
manent, that it makes to every normal musical nature. 
It ‘‘finds’’ the music lover. That is the sole and suffi- 
cient proof of its authority. Though millions of men 
should agree together to condemn and reject it, no true 
musical soul would waver in his conviction that they had 
all really condemned not the music but themselves. 

Exactly such by nature is the authority of the Bible, 
and the nature of its proof. All sorts of external evi- 
dences and aids to belief are offered. There is only one 
proof that holds—the response of the human heart to 
the appeal of the Word of God, and its demonstrated 
power to guide men, individually and in groups, to holy, 
loving, godly living. It is what we need, and it does 
what we need to have done. To the doubter, the liberal 
Christian says, ‘‘Try it and see!’’ He offers no other 
proof, because he knows there is no other. 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 89 


In his attitude to Christ also, the liberal Christian 
stands between the attitude of the authoritarian and 
that of the humanitarian. He shares in the humanitar- 
ian’s regard for Christ as the prince of teachers, and his 
insistence that the words of the Master are precepts 
meant for our actual guidance. But when the human- 
itarian says, with Nicodemus, ‘‘Rabbi, we know that 
thou art a teacher come from God,’’ the liberal Chris- 
tian waits with eager joy for the answer he knows will 
come, ** Verily I say unto you, Ye must be born again.”’ 
Something more is needed than acceptance of teaching, 
however luminous and beautiful; more than self-effort, 
however painstaking and heroic. The soul must be re- 
newed, God must come in, Christ must dwell in the heart 
by faith. For the liberal Christian does not share in the 
serene self-confidence characteristic of the extreme 
humanitarian. He knows himself to be weak, sinful, 
erring. He is sure that his only way of salvation is 
through humble trust in the grace of God, revealed to us 
in Jesus Christ, and communicated to us by the Holy 
Spirit. Therefore he prays and trusts, and seeks in 
Christ not only a teacher from the past to revere, but 
a dear presence now. It is the personality of Christ that 
means most, yea, all, to him. ‘‘ What Christ was, God 
always is; what Christ did, God always does.’’ That is 
his ultimate faith, the secret of his character, his life, 
his religion. 

Yet he will not join the authoritarian in his accept- 
ance of all that the creeds may have said about Christ. 
Rather should we say that, however much of it he may 
accept, he will never be led by the authoritarian into the 
serious error of reckoning one’s intellectual construction 


90 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


of Christ the primary consideration, or into the fatal 
error of putting dogma in the place of importance that 
rightly belongs to life, to spiritual experience. ‘‘I have 
a life in Christ to live,’’ expresses the one decisive convic- 
tion of the liberal Christian. Christ is a fact in this 
life we are living; a fact of history out of the past; yes, 
thank God! But, thank God even more, a history-mak- 
ing fact now, so that ‘‘the life that I now live in the 
flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved 
me, and gave himself for me,’’ who loves me still, and 
by taking up His abode with me in the Spirit, gives 
Himself for and to me now, today. It is in that present, 
vital, spiritual experience of Christ’s abiding presence 
with him that the liberal Christian finds the deepest 
reality of his religion, and the strongest assurance of 
its truth and authority. Here is something that anyone 
ean test for himself, a repeatable and verifiable exper- 
lence, as truly such as any process the scientist puts to 
the test in his laboratory. He who will make a bona fide 
experiment of trust in God as revealed in Jesus will 
find joy and peace, cleansing and vigor, a life that is 
life indeed. And while the humanitarian may call these 
convictions and experiences imaginary, mystical aber- 
glaube, and to the authoritarian they may seem danger- 
ously vague and unfounded and uncertain, the liberal 
Christian knows no fear, for his faith rests where that 
of the great Apostle reposed securely: ‘‘ Nevertheless the 
foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal; the 
Lord knoweth them that are His, and, let everyone that 
nameth the name of Christ depart from all iniquity.’’ 
In an experience of personal fellowship with God, 
realized primarily and evidenced all the way along in 4 


CONTRAST WITH OTHER TYPES 91 


pure and loving life according to Christ, is the real 
essence of religion. Here the liberal Christian finds his 
authority; here he finds his freedom; for here he finds 
God, and his life is hid here with Christ—hid as the roots 
are hidden in the soil, in order that they may bring 
forth in the light of day visible fruits of righteousness, 
peace, love, joy, and self-control, 


CHAPTER IV 
LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW TESTAMENT 


ONE of the most important and significant facts about 
liberal Christianity is often slighted or wholly ignored. 
It is missed completely by many of the critics of modern 
developments in Christian theology and religion. It is 
the fact that one of the chief roots or sources of liberal 
Christianity is the religion of the New Testament. Critics 
of liberalism in religion give large place to the allegation 
that liberal Christians make light of the Bible, and are 
in reality seeking to get away from its high ethical stand- 
ards and doctrinal statements, while, for safety’s sake, 
professing allegiance to those statements and standards. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is fidelity 
to the New Testament which has led liberal Christians 
into many of their most characteristic positions. An 
ecclesiastical world, placidly secure in its accepted ideas 
and creeds, never doubting that in them was the very 
truth of God as revealed in the Scriptures, was sud- 
denly and rudely shaken by the storms of new knowledge 
and keen criticism which broke and beat upon their 
ark in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We 
cannot wonder that it seemed to many as if all things 
were being shaken, and that they murmured the old 
words, ‘‘If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the 
righteous do?’’ But, by the mercy of God, and under 
the loving guidance of His Spirit of all truth, there came 
to their assistance at the same time the popular exten- 

92 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 93 


sion of critical and historical knowledge of the Scrip- 
tures. Men began to study the New Testament afresh 
and thus to know it as it never had been known and 
studied before. Clearer and clearer has grown the con- 
viction that what has really suffered in the storm has 
been, not Christianity, not the New Testament, but cer- 
tain theological constructions of the New Testament 
truth which were partial and temporary in yalue and 
character. Men have come to a new appraisal of the 
Lord Jesus and His great follower, Paul, and of the 
words which they spoke or wrote. And true liberal 
Christianity, in very much of that in which it differs 
from the accepted orthodoxy of past years, has changed 
not through going away from the New Testament, but 
through going further into that precious volume; not 
through ignoring its teachings, but through mastering 
them more fully and clearer of misunderstandings. The 
liberal Christian has come to see that much which has 


passed for essential Christianity is but faintly indicated Ge 


in the New Testament, if at all, coming rather from ex- 
tracanonical sources. The comparatively new and vitally 
important study of Hellenic cults and mystery religions 
and their influence upon the development of Christian 
doctrine and practice, has made us aware that much 
which has been uncritically taken as part and parcel of 
original Christianity was wrought into the fabric of 
the ereeds and customs of the early Church in the course © 
of that curious and marvelous development of the first | 
few centuries which issued in Catholie Christianity; ; 
and that a large part of these developments was taken 
over by Protestantism at the time of the Reformation. 
We are just fully wakening to the fact that what we 


94 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


call Christianity is a complex and varicolored movement. 
It has gathered to itself much that is strange during its 
course through the ages. The Mississippi River flows on 
its way clear and bright toward the gulf, until the enor- 
mous muddy flood of the Missouri pours into it; and 
from that point on, while it still bears the name of 
Mississippi, it bears the aspect of the turgid torrent 
that has swept into it and changed its course and char- 
acter. Even so the rich, earthy, sluggish flood of the 
religions of the Orient came pouring into the crystal-' 
clear current of primitive Christianity; and the re- 
sultant river, while it goes on bearing the name Chris- 
tianity, has caught and retained much of the aspect and 
character of the inflowing streams. 

We know today the facts about the Gospels and the 
other New Testament literature, as men have not known 
them in any period of past time since apostolic days. We 
see Jesus as no others in that same long interval have 
been privileged to see Him. We read in Paul’s words 
what none of these others has been able to find in them. 
And it is from this new knowledge, this new apprecia- 
tion of the meaning of the New Testament, that liberal 
Christianity has come to take shape. The claim is not 
too extreme that liberal Christianity is nearer to the 
true religion of Jesus and Paul than any other main 
movement in the Church today, very much nearer than 
either of the two extreme positions—the authoritarian 
and the humanitarian—with which we contrasted it 
in previous chapters. 

That may seem an overbold claim. But I believe 
it may be substantiated; that any honest student, who 
will trust implicitly to the plain verdict of facts, and to 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 95 


the guidance of the Spirit of God, will come to see the 
truth of it. 

To attempt to show, in complete and full fashion, that 
liberal Christianity is in agreement with the faith of 
the New Testament would be a task quite beyond the 
capacity of the present writer. There are books which 
render this service as I could not hope to do, notably the 
lectures delivered at Auburn Seminary by Professor 
_Richards and published under the title of Christian 
Ways of Salvation; and, from an earlier time, but of 
value quite independent of time, Harnack’s What Is 
Christianity? Very valuable also is Deissmann’s The 
Religion of Jesus and the Faith of Paul. 

All I can hope to do within my space limits here and 
the limitations of my own non-professional equipment 
in scholarship, is to indicate a few of the outstanding 
ways in which liberal Christianity fits closely into the 
ideals and teachings of the New Testament. I raise no 
critical questions about the sources. Let us take the 
New Testament as it stands, without attempting precise 
differentiations between the Synoptic Gospels and the 
Fourth Gospel, or between the religion of Jesus and the 
theology of Paul. Taking the New Testament thus in 
the large, as we have it, and taking liberal Christianity 
in the large, as we know it, let us see how they compare 
and whether, on the main points, they agree. 

Of course the question here is not whether we can 
make liberal Christianity square with this or that iso- 
lated text, or with some series of specially selected pas- 
sages. It is a favorite habit of those who cling inflexibly 
to the truth and authority of the older orthodoxy to 
select a few sayings and call them the essence of the 


96 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


Gospel and of New Testament Christianity, and then to 
judge all the rest of the New Testament and all theolog- 
ical and religious teaching by those sayings. We mean 
to deal with the real drift of the New Testament as a 
whole, with the main current of its teaching. 

In such a brief study two controlling considerations 
may well be observed. The first is that the most impor- 
tant issue is between liberal Christianity and the ex- 
treme conservative theology. It is from this group that 
the attacks upon the liberal mainly come. Yet it is 
with this same group that the liberal Christian finds his 
closest affinities in spirit and aim. One of the most 
decisive questions to be determined is whether liberal 
Christianity can justify itself as being at least as near 
to the New Testament position as is the established or- 
thodoxy in its extreme form. 

The second consideration is that that which gives tone 
to any religion, that which is the heart and essence of 
any form of theology, is its conception of salvation and 
of the way in which it is secured. Any religious move- 
ment that claims to be Christian must be judged su- 
premely by its position with regard to how men are 
saved, and what salvation is. 

We shall do the best that can be done in so brief a 
time, and so small a compass, if we contrast the way of 
salvation held by the extreme conservative wing of the 
Church with the way of salvation as the liberal Christian 
sees it. 

The established authoritarian view of salvation is that 
its meaning and content are chiefly eschatological, and 
that the way and means to its attainment are through 
faith in the substitutionary atonement of Christ. 


THE NEW TESTAMENT if, 


To be more precise, salvation is to be defined and un- 
derstood as meaning chiefly the attainment of life beyond 
death. It is mainly concerned with something which is 
to come to pass in the future. It is not without signifi- 
cance that so frequently extreme conservatism in theol- 
ogy is closely associated with fervent faith in the second 
coming of Christ. When the word ‘‘salvation’’ is used, 
instinctively the mind of the conservative, the spirit of 
the premillennarian, turns to the thought of death, the 
second coming, judgment, heaven. It is in these circles 
of thought and feeling that that curious petition lingers 
longest, ‘‘Save us at last.’’ 

There are of course many individuals who hold tena- 
ciously to conservative views in theology who would 
deny, perhaps with some heat, that their conception of 
salvation is eschatological. They would assert that to 
them salvation means something present and not de- 
ferred. But when asked what that something is, they 
find it hard, if not impossible, to specify. It is ‘‘salva- 
tion from sin,’’ they say, yet they hesitate to profess 
that the Christian is sinless in face of clear facts to 
the contrary. It is freedom from guilt, peace of mind, 
they say. And in that they are at one with the liberal 
Christian. But in that case they are noting certain 
effects, rather than exhibiting the very nature of salva- 
tion. They object strongly to the statement that ‘‘sal- 
vation is character.’? So does the liberal Christian. 
But they find it very hard to point out any real con- 
nection between their conception of salvation and the 
sacrifice of Christ, without its being, in the last analysis, 
eschatological in its meaning. 

With regard to the means, or the way of salvation, 


98 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


they hold firmly to a somewhat elaborate scheme of 
doctrine as indicating the process of Christian salva- 
tion. 

The essentials of this process are: first, that all men 
were involved in Adam’s original sin, or fall, and remain 
so to this day; not merely by sharing with him in a 
common human inheritance, but by being specifically 
involved in the guilt of that first sin, through a ‘‘cove- 
nant’’ made with Adam in which he acted ‘‘not only 
for himself, but for his posterity.’’ 

Second: that, as a result of this fall, all men are out 
of touch with God, and are under His ‘‘wrath and 
curse,’’ which will issue in eternal torment for them 
unless they be delivered from this deadly peril of the 
‘‘wrath to come.’’ 

Third: that, for restoration to divine favor and to 
assurance of eternal life, the wrath of God must be 
placated, and the justice of God vindicated; and that 
through the death of Christ as a sacrifice a way was 
found ‘‘to satisfy divine justice,’’ a transaction in 
which He took the guilt of the sinner upon Himself, and 
suffered in the sinner’s stead. 

Fourth: that in this sacrifice, as the guilt of the sinner 
is imputed to Christ so the righteousness of Christ 
is imputed to the sinner, in order that he may be ac- 
counted righteous in the sight of God. In due course, 
actual righteousness and sanctification follow. 

What, on the other hand, is the liberal conception of 
the meaning and way of salvation? That is not so easy 
to make clear; in part because liberal Christianity ranges 
freely and dislikes fences and corrals; in part also 
because it deals with vital processes, which are always 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 99 


harder to grasp and define than intellectual formulas, or 
facts of history. 

The liberal Christian agrees with the traditionalist in 
the acceptance of certain aspects of the ‘‘doctrines of 
grace.’’ He is as earnestly sure as any upholder of the 
doctrine of original sin, that all men are bound in one 
bundle of life, that our nature is in large part the 
inherited product of the past; that the roots of our sin- 
fulness go back to the beginning of human life. He is 
sure that sin cannot lead to anything but curse and 
misery in the universe of the Righteous and Holy God, 
and that the one real problem in life is how to get rid 
of sin, in the individual and in social life. He knows 
that God hates sin, and that no one ean be in fellow- 
ship with God who is on good terms with sin. : 

He is also convinced, as fervently so as any conserva- 
tive can be, that Jesus Christ came into the world to 
save sinners, and that ‘‘there is none other name in 
which we can be saved.’’? He ascribes to Christ the 
name and office of the ‘‘One Mediator.’’ But he frankly 
avows that forensic, governmental, and strictly substi- 
tutionary theories of how Christ brings about salvation 
mean little or nothing to him; they seem inadequate, 
unworthy, and artificial, in a world which is at heart a 
matter of personal relationships. These older theories 
seem necessarily to represent God as Judge, Sovereign, 
or some other sort of public official. And, to one who 
feels that God is the Father, that life is essentially per- 
sonal, and that the world is God’s home, representations 
of God as Judge or Sovereign are as incongruous, as un- 
satisfying and distasteful, in thinking of salvation, as 
it would be to bring into a home and make operative in 


ae 


100 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


its ongoing the ordered ritual and mechanical procedure 
of a law court or a monarch’s presence-chamber. 
It is not that the liberal Christian has a cheap or 


» easy-going sense of sin. But the root evil and essence 
* “of sin, as he sees it, is not a law broken, a judge of- 


fended, a monarch or magistrate angered. It is rather 
a personal relationship broken, a heart wounded, a dis- 
astrous failure in personal duty and privilege. Is that 
taking a lighter view of sin? He only can say so who 
counts his public relations more important than his real, 
inner dealings with his own household and friends. 
To the liberal Christian, therefore, much of the fabric 
of the substitutionary theology, its elaborate talk of 
*‘eovenants,’’ of offended justice, of accounts kept, af 
satisfaction to be rendered, of imputation whereby 
suilt and righteousness are ‘‘reckoned’’ to others than 
to those to whom they naturally belong, of transmitted 
cuilt from Adam’s first sin, much of this is felt and seen 
to be, not untrue so much as unreal, dealing with shad- 
ows rather than with the substance. The less elaborate 
and the more simple the approach can be made between 
a good father and a bad child, the more hope there is of 
success in the re-establishment of right relations. It 
may be necessary for the father to be severe, or even to 
seem merciless. His must be the long-sighted love that 
can exert to the full that sternness that brings ‘‘the 


' far-off interest of tears.’? Certainly the father must 


suffer with and for the sinful child, and must make 
known to the child how deeply he suffers. There must 
be no compromise, however, as to the necessity of being 
right, and no limit can be set to what the father will 
do to help his child back to right personal relations 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 101 


again. But to the liberal Christian, a student of social 
life, it seems very clear that the failures of the existing 
machinery of legal and governmental procedure of our 
human contriving, are altogether due to the mixture 
of the impersonal and the low grade personal in their 
make-up and administration. Indeed, of late the intro- 
duction of juvenile courts, courts of domestie rela- 
tions, and the like, shows a desire on the part of our 
officials to correct this situation. In the face of this 
new tendency in criminal practice, to retain in our 
thought of the relations between God and man the atmo- 
sphere of the old-time court room seems unworthy and 
reactionary—lowering to the real dignity and glory of 
God. 

The religion of the liberal Christian is, as we have 
said, wholly based on personality at its highest and per- 
sonal relationships at their best. 

To him, therefore, salvation is that life of fellowship 
with God for which man was made; a never-ending, ever- 
deepening’ friendship with the eternal Father; it is 
experiencing the joy of being holy and loving; not 
merely the effort to be good and loving: not that at all. 
The liberal Christian is as sure as his conservative 
brother that salvation is by faith, not by works; that 
true righteousness is never self-righteousness. To be 
saved is to enter into the joy of unconscious, instinctive 
rightness of living, with deep inward harmony of spirit, 
and in true fellowship with God and with man. 

As to the way of salvation, the means and method by 
which it comes, the liberal Christian is sure that it comes 
by the direct action of the spirit of God within and upon 
the soul of man. Only God can bring us out of sin 


102 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


into holiness, out of selfishness into merey and loving 
kindness, out of disharmony into peace, out of death 
into life. 

And the liberal Christian believes that in Jesus Christ 
we have at once and in one person the supreme ap- 
proach of God to man, and the supreme approach of 
man to God. In Him we see the perfect realization of 
the human life that is one with God in absolute personal 
fellowship; in Him also we see God in all His love, 
goodness, inflexible righteousness, and tender sympathy. 
In His life we see what God is; in His death we see how 
far the love of God will go in its saving reach: in His 
life after death we see at once the evidence that he is 
one with the living God, and the earnestness of the 
promise that God ‘‘will not leave us in the dust.’’ 

It is ‘‘in Christ,’’ ‘‘through Christ,’’ that we can find 
salvation, the liberal Christian believes. For, when he 
says ‘‘salvation,’’ his thoughts are not exclusively, or 
even chiefly, on the life to come, although his vision 
takes that in, too. Of life beyond death he can give no 
assurance, save to those who are ‘‘in Christ’’; he is 
sure that to them eternal life is God’s gift. But he 
cannot accept the monstrous notion that life beyond the 
crave is for those only who consciously ‘‘aecept Christ”’ 
or believe a certain creed. The millions who have never 
heard of the Gospel, and the many who have heard its 
message in so poor and twisted a fashion that they have 
rejected what, really known, they would love—all these 
sons of men he is content to trust to the eternal good- 
ness; for, to his mind God would not be worthy of man’s 
trust if He would not do the best that can be done for 
every one of His children. He agrees with Paul that 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 103 


God ‘‘will have all men to be saved.’’ But the liberal 
Christian means, when he says that salvation comes 
‘*through Christ’’ or is found ‘‘in Christ,’’ that the full- 
ness of life in fellowship with God, for which man was 
made, comes surely and radiantly, now and forever, only 
through Jesus Christ. He is the ‘‘One Mediator,’’ in 
the sense that He is the one in whom God and man meet 
and find each other. The liberal Christian, let it be 
frankly said, neither assigns nor grants to the death of 
Christ any such exclusive place as is given to it in the 
system of the dogmatic authoritarian. He makes much 
of it, as the climax and summing up of the life of 
Christ; as the sharpest, clearest revelation of God in his 
relation to sin and the sinner; an overwhelmingly ap- 
pealing demonstration of how far the love of God will 
go, and how far the love of man should go, in suffering 
with and for the sinful. Indeed, the liberal Christian 
is not barred from the use of most, if not all, of the 
imagery with which the atoning death on Calvary has 
been set forth, provided he is free to use it as poetry, 
not as mathematics; as inspired song, not as cold logic. 

Nevertheless, this is true above all, and all through: 
the liberal Christian does not think of, and cannot 
use, or rely on, the death of Christ apart from Christ’s 
life, His teaching of the way and the truth, His resur- 
rection, His present living grace, and the eternal ex- 
perience of the Living God among men. Calvary is to 
him not simply a hill standing by itself, where some- 
thing was done once, apart from human life as a whole, 
on which our salvation depends. It is true that what 
was done there was done once for all; there has been, 
there will be, there can be, no other Calvary. But the 


104 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


glory of Calvary is that on that hill and on that day 
came to perfect, climacteric expression that which the 
living God is always doing; always showing love that 
conquers death and sin, grace that dies to save. Just 
as Jesus Christ is a definite, historic character, and yet 
derives His unique power and glory from the fact that 
what He was, God always is, and that now and ever 
men find God in Him; so the death of Christ is a defi- 
nite, historic event, which yet derives its unique power 
and glory from the fact that what He did, God is always 
doing, and that now and ever men find their sins 
taken away by His love and grace, which will stop at 
no limits where the eternal good of man is involved. 

Inadequate as is this statement of the liberal view of 
the meaning and means of salvation—a personal con- 
fession rather than an authoritative declaration—I be- 
lieve it represents fairly well what most evangelical 
liberal Christians hold to be true about the salvation 
which is in Christ for us men. This is the faith which 
is preached from liberal evangelical pulpits. 

Here, then, are the two views—the authoritarian and 
the liberal Christian. Our question is, now, which of 
these is nearer to the real teaching and spirit of the 
New Testament? Let the scope of the question be 
clearly seen and noted. It does not ask which of the 
two fits the creeds better. It is simply and solely a 
question of closer degree of conformity to the actual 
teaching of Jesus and Paul, and of the New Testament 
as a whole. What are the facts? 

One is embarrassed here by the wealth of material, 
and the sheer impossibility of setting it forth in any 
satisfactory manner. In preparation for this particular 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 105 


chapter, I spent many hours in reading the entire New 
Testament, and noting carefully every definite state- 
ment made in it with regard to the meaning and way 
of salvation. It was a work of grace, an amazing and 
uplifting spiritual experience. I beg all of my readers 
to do something similar. There is nothing more needed 
just now than that very many earnest Christians who 
love the Lord Jesus and genuinely desire to know His 
way of life and to forward His Kingdom, should go to 
the New Testament for themselves with open minds and 
see what its books say with regard to salvation, what it 
is, and how it comes. 

It would take a long course of lectures, or a large 
volume, to do full justice to the teaching of the New 
Testament as to salvation. All I can hope to do is to 
present certain decisive conclusions to which this study 
has brought me. And I most earnestly beg all who read 
these words to adopt the method so successfully used 
in Berea, searching the Scriptures carefully to see 
whether these things are so. The New Testament itself, 
the word of the everlasting Gospel, must give the final 
‘decision. 

What do we find? 

Let us take the Gospels first; and for the purposes of 
this particular study, we need make no separation be- 
tween the three Synoptic Gospels and the Fourth Gos- 
pel. As a matter of fact, added weight attaches to 
what we find in John if we look on it as a late book, 
which contains not only facts in the life of Christ, but 
theological reflections on that life and its meaning. 

We find, first of all, not a hint of Adam’s fall in the 
four Gospels, not a reference to it of any sort; not a 


106 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


suggestion of any scheme of ‘‘covenants,’’—‘‘ covenant of 
works,’’ ‘‘covenant of grace.’’ Of the whole doctrine of 
man’s fall in Adam, and the transmission of original 
euilt therefrom, which bulks so large in dogmatic theol- 
ogy of the authoritarian type, not even a suggestion is 
discoverable in all the four Gospels. 

The only approach I find in the four Gospels to this 
doctrine of transmitted guilt from Adam’s fall is in the 
opening of the ninth chapter of John. There the disci- 
ples, seeing the blind man, ask whether his condition is 
due to the sin of his parents. Jesus declares that that 
does not enter into the case, and turns their attention 
from speculations about the past to the needs of the 
present. So far as I can discover there is but this one 
approach in the thought of the Gospels to the doctrine 
of Adam’s fall and the transmission of original sin, and 
it is a very faint one, which, on the whole, counts against 
rather than for giving it a place of any importance in 
Christian doctrine. 

We will anticipate somewhat and state here that no- 
where else in the entire New Testament do we find any 
reference to Adam’s fall, save in two passages in Paul’s 
epistles. In one of these a parallelism is drawn which 
is far from congruous with the Adamic theory of original 
sin; for it declares that ‘‘as in Adam all die, even so 
in Christ shall all be made alive.’’ If this parallel be 
taken literally, then it must mean all men in the one 
case as well as in the other. That interpretation lands 
us in Universalism. 

As a matter of fact, when the statement is interpreted 
in its proper bearing, it does not lie open to the charge 
of sustaining Universalism. Anyone familiar with Paul’s 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 107 


thought and language knows that he uses the phrases 
‘‘in Adam”’ and ‘‘in Christ’’ to designate states of spir- 
itual experience. The verse thus means that all who 
are ‘‘in Adam,’’ that is, in the natural, fleshly state of 
the soul, are dead; and that all who are ‘‘in Christ’’ 
are alive. But it is clear, if we take this view, that 
Paul views the being ‘‘in Adam”’ not as participation in 
the ‘‘guilt of his first transgression,’’ but as the char- 
acteristic spiritual experience of the unredeemed soul. 
There is no hint whatsoever here of any intention to 
assert or imply that all men were potentially present 
when Adam sinned, or that they share the guilt of that 
first sin. 

The other of the two passages is the fifth chapter of 
Romans. While it makes more of the figure of Adam, 
the simple fact is that no such thought as the imputation 
of sin or guilt enters into its language, taken at its face 
value. The thought, instead, is that all men share in 
sin, aS universally as they share in the human nature 
that sins; that the sin they do is their own as much 
as is the bit of human nature with which they do it. 
Here also it is clearly stated that the gift of life is as 
universal as the heritage of death. As ‘‘the many’’ die, 
so ‘‘the many’”’ are made righteous. 

Even if we should grant that this classic passage 
means all that the covenant theology has taken it to 
mean, it would surely be questionable procedure to make 
so immense and weighty a dogma depend thus on a single 
passage. Add what is unquestionably true, that Paul 
was fond of poetic imagery for its illustrative value— 
delightfully expressed by a great modern scholar in the 
statement that had Paul been speaking to men of a 


108 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


later day, his message would have been addressed not 
so much to theologians as to musicians, not to Anselm, 
but to John Sebastian Bach—and then revert to the 
fact that the passage in question is very far actually 
from supporting clearly the traditional interpretation, 
for it lends itself readily to alternative explanations, 
and this will seem a slender and frail peg on which to 
hang so large and heavy a doctrine as that of original 
sin and the fall in Adam. If that dogma were as cen- 
trally important as theologians of the older school have 
averred, would it not, like ‘‘the Kingdom of God,’’ 
appear and reappear on page after page of the Gospels? 
Not a suggestion, or a shadowed hint of it is found in 
them. And would not Paul have given it fuller recog- 
nition? Theologians may defend the dogma of the fall 
of all men in Adam, and their consequent share in the 
euilt of original sin, as a creation of their own, on the 
basis of logic and argument. It cannot be maintained 
that it is an essential or important doctrine of New 
Testament teaching. 

A similar statement can be made, well nigh as deci- 
sively, with regard to the absence from the four Gospels 
of the forensic doctrine of substitutionary atonement and 
the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Those who 
hold these doctrines to be essential or important elements 
of Christian truth may be successfully challenged to ad- 
duce any support for them from these four books. Abun- 
dant testimony is forthcoming in the four Gospels to the 
fact that Christ came into the world to save sinners; 
there is ample support for the assertion that His death is 
a powerful factor in that work of salvation; but no em- 
phatie or unmistakable testimony in confirmation of any 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 109 


forensic or governmental theory of justification, or of 
any strictly substitutionary view of the atonement. How 
amazing, therefore, is this insistence that something 
should be regarded as in a very special sense ‘‘the Gos- 
pel,’’ which is nowhere emphasized or strongly stated 
in any one of the four Gospels! 

Indeed, there is just one passage in all the Gospea 
material which can be quoted with even a shade of war- 
rant in support of the extreme form in which the ‘‘doc- 
trines of grace’’ are conceived by dogmatic authori. 
tarianism; particularly the doctrine of substitutionary 
atonement. It is the saying of Jesus, reported in Mat- 
thew xx. 28 and Mark x. 45 that, ‘‘the Son of Man came 
to give His life a ransom for many.’’ Unquestionably, 
the word ‘‘ransom,’’ taken in its original and native 
sense, refers to a payment whereby one is set free from 
slavery, or captivity, or some evil condition. It is also 
a fact to which full weight should be given that our 
Lord here uses the preposition gyct, the root idea of 
which is ‘‘instead of,’’ or ‘‘in place of,’’ rather than 
Saéo, which means ‘‘on behalf of.’’ This saying might, 
therefore, be brought forward as an exception to the 
general rule that the theological ideas of substitution 
or imputation are not found in the Gospels. 

But fair-mindedness goes on to take into the account 
also certain other facts. Greek scholars tell us that 
good form requires the use of dyct with Aitoov; and 
that its use, therefore, in putting Jesus’ words into 
Greek will not serve to determine the expression orig- 
inally used by Him in Aramaic. It must also be ad- 
mitted that the saying contains no hint as to the person 
+9 whom, or the way in which, the ransom is to be paid. 


110 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


The substitutionary theory of atonement is only one 
way and not certainly the best way in which these two 
questions may be answered. 

But the most decisive fact of all is that in this same 
connection our Lord acts as His own interpreter, by 
referring to His coming death as significant for two 
reasons: first, as setting forth the spirit in which He 
came, lived, and ministered; and second, as constituting 
an example to His followers. It is quite impossible to 
evade or escape the implications of the fact—more im- 
pressive in its simple directness than any amount of 
subtle theologizing—that our Lord introduces this state- 
ment with which we are dealing, of the meaning of His 
death, with the words ‘‘even as,’’ or as quoted by Mark, 
‘*For the Son of Man also.’’ If that means anything it 
means, ‘‘you too must be as I am, and do as I do; 
my death must show your spirit.’’ This is exactly 
what Christ’s greatest human interpreter does when he 
explains that his telling of Christ’s ‘‘equality with God’’ 
and His ‘‘death on the cross’’ has been done for the 
purpose of emphasizing the practical counsel, ‘‘Have 
this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.’’ Even 
in this one cardinal text relied on by dogmatic authori- 
tarians, the death of our Lord is set forward by Him- 
self as an example to His followers rather than as a 
substitutionary sacrifice for sin, in which they can have 
no share, and which cannot be imitated in their own lives. 

One saying out of all the wealth of the four Gospels! 
And that saying far from clear in its teaching of a 
substitutionary theory of the atoning death; appearing 
to some of us rather to present that death as an ex- 
ample, a manifestation for our emulation of the spirit 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 111 


of sacrifice for others which saves and purifies and 
works redemption. Again we say, a slender peg on 
which to hang so weighty and precise a doctrine. 

I cannot refrain from emphasizing once more the 
_fact that in the fourth Gospel, latest and most theolog- 
ical of New Testament books, there is no hint or trace 
of the substitutionary theory of the atonement, or of 
what older theology used to call ‘‘the scheme of re- 
demption,’’ in which the death of Christ in the sinner’s 
stead had central place. What tremendous decisiveness 
dwells in the fact that the Prologue to that Gospel, writ- 
ten long after the Lord’s death and resurrection, giving 
the most majestic forthsetting in the whole New Testa- 
ment of the glory of the divine Christ and Lord, leading 
up to the great declaration that through His coming into 
human history light and salvation and sonship came to 
man—that in all this there is no hint that the death 
of Christ in our stead is a cardinal fact in Christian doc- 
trine. Here is a ‘‘Cur Deus Homo?’’ beside which An- 
selm’s has no authority at all; and that which Anselm 
decides to be the essential element in the answer does 
not even emerge in John’s discussion of the meaning of 
Christ’s incarnation. That is a fact worthy of serious 
attention. 

In the fourth Gospel, as in the Synoptists—perhaps 
even more than in them—much is made of the death of 
Christ. Our salvation is shown to be intimately con- 
nected with that death. But always that death is held 
aloft as the supreme manifestation of the habitual spirit 
of Christ, as the necessary climax of His life and work, 
or as the power that shall attract men, and unify all the 
‘‘children of God,’’ as the fullest revelation of the love 


112 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


of God that will not be denied, the grace of God that 
knows no limit, or as the supreme and perfect example 
for men to adore and follow. It would be a joy and a 
satisfaction to go through the Gospels and show how 
clear is this fact. I must leave each of my readers to 
do that for himself. I can only point out certain great 
and decisive discoveries that emerge as we honestly 
seek to learn the teaching of the Gospels. 

Always, when the Master uses the word ‘‘save,’’ or 
‘‘salvation,’’ he means fullness of life. He does not 
always discriminate between spiritual and physical life. 
Indeed in many cases He uses the word to denote the 
new and radiant health of body that came to sick men 
and women through contact with Him. ‘‘Thy faith hath 
saved thee’’ was said most frequently, if not exclusively, 
to those recipients of an added fullness of life who were 
thereby freed of bodily or mental ills. And always the 
means of that salvation is contact with the personality | 
of Christ Himself. It is so clear in the Gospels that one 
wonders how anyone can fail to see it, that to Christ 
Himself ‘‘salvation’’ did not mean acquittal in a court- 
room, forensic justification, or release from guilt or 
penalty through the intervention of a substitute. Sal- 
vation plainly meant to Him fresh access of vital force, 
a new vigor, zest, and joy of living, and to Him the 
means of salvation was always personal contact with 
His own radiant, life-giving personality. Always He 
was busy, turning men’s thoughts and hearts to the 
God who was lke Him, revealed in Him, known and 
made known by Him. He is the ‘‘bread’’ by which 
men live, the ‘‘grace that comes down from heaven 
and gives life.’’ Always it is this impartation of added 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 113 


fullness to life that stands out as the chief meaning 
of salvation in the narratives of the first three Gospels, 
the doctrines of the fourth, and in the whole life 
and teaching of Jesus ‘‘as He is offered to us in the 
Gospel.’’ Beginning at the Sermon on the Mount and 
on through all that Jesus did and taught while in 
bodily presence on earth, He clearly shows that to 
His view the ‘‘saved’’ man, the happy, blessed, God- 
approved child of the Father and of the Father’s 
home, is the one who has found, and finds every day 
in growing measure, a true spiritual experience, a 
spirit characterized by humility, sincerity, unselfishness, 
aspiration after righteousness, kindness, inward purity, 
love of peace and steadfast loyalty, the one who dares 
stand for God and truth, who enters into the joy and 
elory of self-devotion, whose righteousness exceeds that 
of the Pharisee because it is inward and loving, whose 
ideal is to be perfect as God is perfect, who yet knows 
that the beginning of that perfection is for a man to 
turn and become as a little child. Poor in spirit and yet 
dauntless; seeking first the Kingdom of God; finding 
the whole Bible condensed in the Golden Rule, and the 
two great commandments; loving, keeping, doing the 
will of the Master, and walking in His way and truth; 
eager to be kind and ready to forgive—so does the 
Gospel picture the ‘‘saved’’ man. One who goes with 
open mind to the Synoptic Gospels, rises from their 
study forced to the irresistible conclusion that to Christ 
the ‘‘saved’’ man was the Christlike, the one who had 
‘‘entered into life’’ and found the secret of joy, vigor, 
and peace in a spirit and life like that of his Savior, 
yes, like that of God Himself. This life of love and faith, 


114 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


of fearlessness and joy, of daily fellowship with God— 
wholesomely ethical as well as wholesomely mystical— 
this is salvation as Jesus saw it. Its very center and 
essence is personal fellowship with God, and with Christ 
who reveals Him. Salvation came to Zaecheus when 
Christ entered his life as well as his home. Mary chose 
the good part when she chose to sit at the feet of Jesus 
in humble, loving fellowship. And all may find ‘‘rest’’ 
and ‘‘life’? by coming to Him, just coming, without 
the surmounting of theological fences, or the accepting 
of doctrinal or other requirements. ‘‘Him that cometh 
to Me I will in no wise east out.’’ 

Every time Christ speaks of hell, or of eternal danger 
and loss, the connection shows the fatal lack to be, not 
one of doctrinal soundness, nor of isolation from ‘‘the 
true Church,’’ but the lack of this living and loving 
grace. In one instance He draws a picture of the judg- - 
ment which is more impressive and convincing than 
Michelangelo’s painting, or Spohr’s oratorio, or all that 
the creeds and theologies have said abont the Last Judg- 
ment; and the test, the only test, on which the issues of 
eternity are made to hang, is simple love, shown in 
kindness and service, unconscious love, the revelation 
of a right heart. He tells of one man in hell; and all 
we are told of him is that he failed to be kind, to show 
the spirit of Christ. Indeed the word of Paul might 
be the motto of the story of Dives, ‘‘If any man have 
not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His.’’ 

Such is salvation according to the Jesus of the Gos- 
pels. Bearing this in mind, and remembering also that 
while our Lord spoke of ‘‘salvation’’ some dozen times 
only, he spoke more than one hundred times of the 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 115 


‘Kingdom of God,’’ 7.¢e., of redemption as a great com- 
mon enterprise for the world, in which we are to share 
with Him, we can confidently and gladly claim that 
liberal Christianity in its view of what salvation is comes 
very near to the spirit and view of the Master Himself. 

What of the means whereby salvation is obtained, the 
‘‘way’’ by which one enters into life? Is there discover- 
able in all the four Gospels, any statement that no one 
is saved, nor can anyone enter into the new and eternal 
life, except through some process or scheme, the out- 
working of a supernatural drama? Are we anywhere 
told that the way to salvation is through believing in the 
death of Christ as a satisfaction for sin and a substitute 
for the penalty the sinner had to pay, or that one can 
become right with God only through the imputation to 
him of Christ’s righteousness? I am not now attempting 
to pass upon the question of the truth of these doctrines, 
though, it must be admitted, the question of their vital 
importance is clearly involved here. I am raising, how- 
ever, a simple question of fact: Does our Lord, in the 
Gospels, clearly teach the ‘‘way’’ of salvation held to 
be essential by authoritarians? The plain answer is 
that He does not. He does not even hint at it. 

On the other hand, His teaching is simple, clear, de- 
cisive, as to the ‘‘way’’ of salvation. It is through 
coming to God, and especially through coming to God 
as revealed in Christ. It is through obedience, following, 
doing the will, loving God, having the grace of God in 
the heart, With no hint of preliminaries, of theological 
conditions to be met, or of any conditions at all, we are 
to ask, seek, and knock, until our persistence is rewarded 
with the establishment of the closer personal contact 


116 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


with God that brings in its train the added fullness of 
life ealled salvation. ‘‘Come unto me,’’ ‘‘follow me,’’ 
‘‘believe in God,’’ that is all. Jesus left one prayer 
for His followers to use. In it He tells us to ask for- 
giveness of sins simply and directly. Forgiveness is for 
those who forgive, eternal life is for those who obey, 
follow, love, and serve. Those are in that personal re- 
lationship which 7s salvation, who do the will of God: 
‘‘for whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is 
my brother and sister and mother.’’ One inherits eternal 
life by loving God and one’s neighbor; and the Lord 
even chooses a heretic in doctrine to exemplify the all- 
inclusive love that gives entrance into eternal life. His 
richest, deepest teaching of what it means to be saved, 
that parable of the Lost Son in which the human heart 
left to itself has always found the heart of the Gospel, 
shows salvation as coming just through the son’s turning 
again to his Father. That parable decisively condemns 
the self-righteous idea of salvation by one’s own good- 
ness, in the hateful character of the elder son; but it 
shows the sinner finding salvation, not through any sae- 
rifice, or the outworking of any forensic or substitu- 
tionary scheme, but just through penitence and faith 
on the one hand, and forgiving love on the other. There 
is an animal slain in that story; but it is to provide, not 
a sacrifice, but a feast of joy. 

Equally clear as in the Synoptists is the position of 
the fourth Gospel that the ‘‘ way’’ of salvation is through 
the grace of God coming to man, as man comes to God. 
At the very outset the ‘‘Lamb of God’’ is presented as 
about to ‘‘take away the sin of the world’’ through His 
death: yet the death is looked on, as later in the book, 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 117 


as @ necessary preliminary to the ‘‘baptism with the 
spirit.’’ It is the grace of God that brings salvation, 
giving men a new birth, making them see the Kingdom; 
God so loved the world that He gave His Son, that men, 
believing on Him, might have eternal life. It is in this 
personal relationship with God through Christ that salva- 
tion is found. <As clearly and emphatically as in the 
Synoptists is salvation, in the fourth Gospel, made de- 
pendent on obedience—a view emphasized in the first 
Epistle of John also. The grace of God in Christ is 
the channel through which the living water comes. It 
is he who “‘hears’’ and ‘‘believes,’? hears Christ’s word, 
and believes on the God who sent Him, who is saved— 
a statement practically identical with the uncompromis- 
ing, simple test, ‘‘not every one that saith unto me, 
Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but 
he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.’’ 
Not even the sacred Scriptures have life in themselves: 
they only point to Christ, in whose personal fellow- 
ship is life. As Jesus lived through communion with 
God, even so we may live the same life eternal through 
communion with God in Him. The all-important 
matter is being ‘‘willing to do His will.’’ Abiding 
in Him, and in His word, is the condition of life and 
salvation. We trust Him, as the sheep trust the shep- 
herd, and He gives eternal life. In that beautiful figure 
of the sheepfold, in which the shepherd ‘‘lays down his 
life for the sheep,’’ it is made clear that his death is one 
with His life, in proof of His extreme, unreserved love 
and eare for them. He, not facts or doctrines about Him, 
is ‘‘the resurrection and the life.’’ 

The cross is indeed presented sublimely, impressively,/ 


118 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


in the fourth Gospel. Certain Greeks visit Him, and 
to Jesus their approach is an earnest of how the whole 
earth is expectantly ready for the true God and eternal 
life to be made known. He Whom God sent must die 
to spread that Gospel through the world. But note 
carefully two clear facts about His death as it presents 
itself to Jesus. The first is that He views it as a striking 
instance of a cosmic principle of sacrifice, of life through 
death, a principle of God’s ceaseless working in all ages; 
one with the growing of wheat, and with all dying that 
issues in life. The other is that the effect which He fore- 
sees and foretells will follow from His being ‘‘lifted up’’ 
is that it will ‘‘draw men to Him,’’ making them more 
vividly aware of Him. The value and power of His death 
is clearly set forth as residing in the making of Him, 
His personality, His saving fellowship, more impressive 
and appealing. That is Jesus’ own view of the meaning 
and value of His death, as set forth by John. 

The long discourse found in the fourteenth, fifteenth, 
and sixteenth chapters of John is given as the final 
word of our Master to ‘‘His own.’’ Surely, here we 
would expect to find the fundamentals of His gospel. 
We find the words full of life, of grace, of joy, of com- 
munion with Christ, and with God through Him, but not 
a hint in them of any ‘‘scheme of salvation’’ as neces- 
sary, or of any substitutionary meaning in His death. 
The one outright reference in them to His death repre- 
sents that death as one in spirit with all sacrificial dying 
for one’s friends, as a supreme proof of love. ‘‘The 
way, truth, and life’’ are there set forth not in creeds 
or forms, but in Christ Himself. Life eternal is defined 
as ‘‘knowing God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent.’’ 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 119 


Saving knowledge is described as knowing that God sent 
Jesus, and that Jesus knew God, and in abiding in the 
‘‘name’’ of God and the love of God. 

Different as the Christ of the fourth Gospel may 
seem to some from the Christ of the Synoptists, He is one 
and the same in His forthsetting of what salvation is and 
how it comes, It is life, ‘‘more life and fuller,’’ and it 
comes by direct gift of God in spiritual communion to 
those who humbly receive it, repenting of their sins, 
trusting in God’s grace, and obeying His voice and His 
Son. 

One comes from a study of the four Gospels clearly 
convinced that their teaching about the meaning and 
way of salvation is one with the true heart of the mes- 
sage of salvation found in liberal Christianity today, 
far more consonant with it than with the authoritarian 
position. 

But those who speak for the authoritarian rather than 
for the vital conception of the meaning and way of sal- 
vation would here interpose with two statements. The 
first is that the absence of the doctrine of substitutionary 
atonement from the Gospels is a natural one, due to the 
fact that not much would be said about the meaning of 
the death of Christ until that death had taken place; 
and that we should not ask that the Christian doctrine 
of salvation, therefore, be found in reality until we come 
to deal with those who, through the spirit of God, inter- 
pret to us the deep meaning of Calvary as an atonement 
wherein Christ suffered in the sinner’s stead. 

There is some justification for this contention. Jesus 
Himself told His followers that there were important 
truths which He could not tell them while present with 


120 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


them, but must leave to the Spirit’s guidance to bring 
to them. No one ean safely or wisely or rightly go 
““back to Christ,’’ in the sense in which that phrase has 
sometimes been understood, ignoring what Paul and 
others have said to us under the guidance of the Spirit 
of Truth. 

Yet this contention may be pushed, and has been 
pushed by some, to extremes that have almost nullified 
the power and value of Christ’s own teaching and point 
of view, or put it on a plane of lower importance as 
compared with the teaching of Paul. Refreshing vigor 
and wholesome truth are combined in this word from 
one of the Christian leaders of our day: ‘‘The statement 
that Jesus made the forgiveness of sins, which He 
preached, secretly dependent upon His own future death, 
is to be placed among the most poverty-stricken of theo- 
logical foundlings. He announced the full amnesty of 
the Father without bargaining or haggling: ‘Thy sins 
are forgiven thee.’ ’’* 

Such is the clear teaching of the four Gospels as to 
the meaning and way of salvation. Were these our entire 
New Testament, liberal Christianity might rightly claim 
not only to be entitled to the name of ‘‘Christian,’’ but 
to be considered peculiarly faithful to the original mean- 
ing of that saving revelation of God and of His grace 
which came to men in and through our Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

But, as we have said, those who hold strongly to the 
Catholic, or authoritarian, conception of salvation urge 
that the gospels are not the only trustworthy records 

1Deissmann, The Religion of Jesus and the Faith of Paut, 
p. 89, 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 121 


of early Christianity ; that we have also, as authoritative, 
the letters of Paul, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the 
other documents that make up the New Testament; and 
that the points of view found in these are at least as 
important and as decisive as those found in the Gos- 
pels. Indeed, some extremists have gone so far as to 
elaim for Paul and his views an authority which takes 
precedence over that of the words of Christ Himself. 
Christ came into the world in order to die, they say; 
and therefore no complete and authoritative view of 
His mission and work was possible until His death had 
taken place. Its meaning could only then be unfolded. 

To this extreme view there is a decisive answer. 
No one who knows truly at all the mind of Paul 
ean doubt with what horror and vehemence this ideal 
would have been opposed by him, that he, the ‘‘bond- 
servant of Jesus Christ,’’ should be regarded as superior 
in authority to his Master. No! If there is conflict of 
authority, if the issue comes to a head, and one has to 
be taken and the other rejected, let the Master’s prin- 
ciple be followed, ‘‘a servant is not greater than his 
Lord.’? Sound Christian sense will always hold with 
Matthew Arnold, that ‘‘ Jesus is above the heads of His 
interpreters,’’ even of the greatest of them all. 

Yet no one can question, nor should anyone wish to, 
the fact that Paul presents Christ and Christianity in 
a new way which adds much to its presentation in the 
Gospel. That Spirit of truth, promised by the Lord to 
His disciples, rested in wonderful measure on the great 
apostle. He revealed added depths of meaning in the 
Christian facts which others had not seen. 

Unquestionably he does represent salvation as de- 


122 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


pending on the death of Christ, a death which was 
(though I am sure Paul would say ‘‘is’’) a propitiation. 
We are redeemed by, or in, His blood. He nailed our 
sins to His cross. We are justified, acquitted, on the 
eround of His perfect atoning sacrifice. There is very 
much in Paul’s epistles to sustain the view of salvation 
taken by the extreme dogmatic authoritarian, and there 
is much also to give color to the claims of the sacramen- 
tarian and institutional authoritarian. Augustine, who 
so powerfully furthered the development of both these 
tendencies, drew inspiration thereto from Paul, espe- 
cially from the epistle to the Romans. To Paul, man is 
above all a sinner to be saved. And salvation seems to 
him a far more intricate and difficult process than it is 
represented to be in the words of Jesus. Paul was not 
of the opinion that the sinner could just ‘‘come to God’’ 
and be forgiven; at least some sinners could not. He 
had found it no such simple process; and he was one of 
those intense souls to whom their personal experiences 
are forever normative and decisive. There must be a 
change of nature so radical that only mighty forces 
eould avail to bring it about. And the cross loomed up 
in Paul’s field of vision as the very central fact and 
enabling force in that redemption. By nature one was 
‘‘in sin’’; he must become ‘‘in Christ.’’ That change 
could be made only through the atoning sacrifice of Christ 
on the cross, which thereby proved itself the solution 
of the religious quest of the heart of man through the 
ages. 

One cannot, inside the present limits of discussion, deal 
adequately with the tremendous question of Paul’s con- 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 123 


ception of redemption and of the essential meaning of 
Christianity. I must refer you to the books devoted to 
that question. In addition to older and better known 
treatises, I have found Peabody’s The Apostle Paul and 
the Modern World, and Deissmann’s The Religion of 
Jesus and the Faith of Paul helpful and illuminating. 
The last-named, though brief and general in character, 
is especially rich in suggestion and in deep spiritual 
insight. , 

It will not be amiss, however, to call your attention 
to certain facts with regard to Paul and his thinking 
which serve to correct the assumption so widely ob- 
taining and so long persisting that, to Paul, Christianity 
meant only a scheme of redemption wrought through 
faith in the fact of Christ’s suffering on Calvary in the 
sinner’s stead. Based on Paul’s writings as this view is, 
and forming, as it does, an important part of his theol- 
ogy, it is by no means the whole, nor even the heart, of 
his ‘‘gospel.’’ 

Any inquiry into Paul’s view of Christian truth needs 
to keep constantly in mind these considerations: 

1. We must be sure to note and take into account 
how wide is the latitude and variety of imagery employed 
by Paul to set forth the meaning of the cross of Christ, 
and of the Christian life. It is impossible to under- 
stand Paul truly until one appreciates the fact that 
he was essentially and most of all a poetic soul. 
He saw in images. The widely accepted view that he . 
was beyond all else a theologian is quite inaccurate. 
His most theological passages are quick with the 
vivid images and word-uses of a poet. He is a theo- 


124 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


logian in the same sense that Robert Browning is a phil- 
osopher. 

It is obviously doing less than justice to such a soul 
to seize on some one of these many images, or forms, of 
his thought, even though it be the most dramatic, the 
most striking, the one most frequently used, and count 
that the sum and substance of his message. When Paul 
spoke of ‘‘my gospel’’ he meant something far richer 
and more varied than the scheme of soteriology 
which some represent as the whole of distinctive Chris- 
tianity. 

Paul was a Hebrew, with a considerable amount of in- 
tellectual and practical contact with the Roman world 
of affairs and the Hellenic world of ideas. He drew 
freely from all these sources. Rabbinic argument by 
allegory presses close in his thinking upon Platonic 
idealism, and is followed by, or fused with, Roman ideas 
of law and justice. He ransacked the world of his time 
for illustration and illumination wherewith to set Christ 
before the mind of his age. One feels sure, as he reads 
Paul, that if that great soul were here today he would 
be taking toll, with consuming eagerness and joy, of the 
wealth of knowledge and imagery that modern science 
has discovered, bringing it all into captivity to the obe- 
dience of Christ. 

Those who see Christian redemption adequately set 
forth in terms of acquittal in a court room, or in terms 
of cancellation of a debt, or in any other single aspect, 
need to remind themselves of the breadth and sweep of 
Paul’s imagery of salvation. Perhaps, this cannot better 
be made clear than by quoting Professor Deissmann, to 
whom my debt is great. He says that when we study 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 125 


Paul’s religious confessions to the best advantage, they 
become: 


‘‘Many rays streaming in all directions from the 
one point of light given in the experience of com- 
munion with Christ. 

There are many other synonyms besides, but the 
following are the most important: justification, rec- 
onciliation, forgiveness, redemption and adoption. 

In all these figurative expressions man stands be- 
fore God, each time in a different guise before the 
same God, first as an accused person, secondly as an 
enemy, thirdly as a debtor, fourthly and fifthly as a 
slave. In all these cases man is in an abnormal and 
bad position. Then, in Christ, he comes into the nor, 
mal and good position. 

We shall not comprehend Paul until we have heard 
all these various testimonies concerning salvation in 
Christ sounding together in harmony like the notes of 
a single full choral. 

The Pauline illustrations will be more satisfac- 
torily adapted to our own times the less we petrify 
them into dogmatic statements, and the more we see 
them as expressions of living religion.’’ 


These are wise and true words, to which all must give 
heed who wish to find out for themselves the real teach- 
ing and gospel of Paul. 

2. A second consideration we must keep in mind in 
regard to Paul’s thinking is that to him the death of 
Christ is never thought of alone or in itself. Always it 
is associated inseparably with the resurrection and the 
living power of Christ; and more often than it is 


126 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


viewed as, above all, the necessary preliminary to His 
resurrection, something through which He had to pass at 
the hands of men in order to attain to the divine power 
whereby He saves men. 

It is scarcely too much to say that to the mind of 
Paul the resurrection rather than the death was the 
more vital, as doctrine or fact. Abundant evidence can 
be found to support this assertion. In his first sermon 
given in the Acts, thé entire stress, in proving His 
Messiahship, is laid on the resurrection of Jesus, and His 
death is viewed as having been brought about by those 
evil leaders who wished, but were unable, to thwart God’s 
saving purpose. It is the resurrection that is chiefly 
significant. Why? Because by it the world regained 
a Christ who is living, and can now save by His living 
and present grace of fellowship. The sermon at Athens 
says not a word of the cross, but leads up to the resurree- 
tion as its climax. The one thing which the practical, 
non-religious Roman governor, Festus, caught from 
Paul’s speech was that Paul said that someone was alive 
whom the Jews said was dead—an interesting confirma- 
tion of the view that it was the resurrection on which 
Paul constantly laid stress. In this, his preaching is at 
one with that of Peter, of Stephen, and of all the primi- 
tive Church leaders. Had we only the Book of the Acts 
to rely on, we would be inclined to say that the death 
of Christ was only a necessary and terrible incident, due 
to the stupidity and hatefulness of certain men, but 
that that shameful death had been swallowed up in the 
elory of the resurrection. 

Even when Paul is most captivated by, and brooding 
most deeply on, the meaning of the cross, most 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 127. 


thoroughly ‘‘lost in wonder, love, and praise’’ at the 
mysteries of redemption in the blood of Christ—the 
light of the open tomb, or rather the lght of the 
heavenly glory of the Risen and Living Lord, plays 
all around his thought. It will do anyone good to trace 
through the great epistle to the Romans this close con- 
nection of the life with the death: ‘‘Who was delivered 
for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification.’’ 
‘‘If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God 
through the death of His Son, much more, being recon- 
ciled, shall we be saved by his life.’’ 

Wherever Paul seems to be making a concise and in- 
clusive statement of the essential Christian beliefs, there | 
we always find the resurrection in possession of the 
supreme place, the cross even being omitted at times. 
In the great summary which he says includes ‘‘the gos- 
pel which I preached, which ye received, wherein ye 
stand, by which ye are saved,’’ after mention of the 
belief that ‘‘Christ died for our sins according to the 
Seriptures,’’* he goes on to enlarge upon and to empha- 
size the resurrection, and the power and grace that come 
from the living Lord, giving much more space and attach- 
ing much greater importance to the resurrection than he 
gives to the death. In the beautiful hymn incorporated 
in I Timothy, setting forth the elements of ‘‘the mys. 
tery of godliness,’’ we find mention of the incarnation 
of Christ, His spiritual glory and approvedness, His evi- 
dent communion with the unseen world, His central place 
in Christian preaching, and as the object of saving faith, 
His being ‘‘received up into glory,’’ but no word about 
His death. In the passage in which Paul comes nearer 

21 Cor. xv. 17ff. 


128 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


than anywhere else to a definite statement of the beliefs 
necessary to salvation, he declares that this is ‘‘the word 
of faith which we preach: that if thou shalt confess with 
thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thy heart 
that God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be 
saved.’’* Much as the cross undoubtedly meant to Paul, 
if it was so truly the one vital matter to him which dog- 
matie authoritarians declare it to have been, could he 
by any possibility have overlooked it in this confession of 
the faith accounted by him as essential to salvation? Is 
not this omission plain proof that the resurrection, even 
more than the eross, held the central place in Paul’s 
thinking and in his Gospel? These are but a few strik- 
ing instances. Anyone can add an indefinite number 
of others by reading Paul’s epistles with an eye to this 
emphasis of his on the resurrection. It is but the simple 
truth to say, in the words of a student and lover of 
Paul, ‘‘the death on the cross and the resurrection of 
Christ cannot in Paul be isolated as two distinct facts; 
as contemplated by him they are inseparably con- 
nected.’ * 

3. A third consideration we should always bear in 
mind, in attempting to understand the thought of Paul, 
is that his thinking and his theology always were strongly 
colored by his own spiritual experience. 

He came to Christ out of ‘‘the law,’’ through a har- 
rowing experience of struggle that shook his soul to the 
depths. Why should we assume that all men and wom- 
en and children must come to God in the same way, and 
construe their salvation in the same terms? Thank God 


?Rom. x. 9. 
*Deissmann, p. 237. 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 129 


that in Paul we have so wonderful a revelation, fresh 
for all time, of how a sinner can be drawn out of deep 
despair and a crushing sense of guilt, break utterly with 
his past, and find peace and life in Christ! In every 
age there will be many who will come to God in that 
way, who indeed can come in no other way. In truth, 
there will be few, if any, who will not enter somewhat 
into that experience of crisis and transformation. But 
thank God also for the story of the Prodigal, and the 
other blessed words that prompt us to say, ‘‘I will arise 
and go’’ to the forgiving and loving heart of God. Thank 
God especially for the perfect example in Jesus of a way 
to live with God without any such exile period of storm 
and stress. Why not give up insisting that there is but 
one way, when the Master Himself has opened many of 
them? Why forget His own blessed word about the way 
of becoming as a little child, or about the way of the 
new birth? Every one of us now knows that he was 
born, but who of us was conscious of it at the time? It 
is blessed indeed to come to God as naturally as a child 
turns to a loving mother, or even as unconsciously as a 
little babe slips into the family circle. 

4. A fourth consideration is worthy of our attention 
in attempting to understand the thought of Paul, even 
though it be in fact nothing more than a fresh point of 
view, or a new intensity of emphasis, with regard to one 
of those already mentioned. We shall quite miss the 
true meaning in Paul’s words if we do not continually 
bear in mind that to him religion was always a present, 
personal, vital experience. There are many indubitable 
proofs of this. When he tells of the vision that arrested 
him on his way to Damascus he says, not that Christ 


130 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


was there revealed to him in the heavens; still less that 
what was there revealed to him was the meaning of what 
Christ had been and done in the past; ‘‘It pleased God 
to reveal His Son in me.’’? That phrase might justly be 
taken as the keynote of Paul’s religion and theology. Al- 
ways it was ‘‘Christ in me,’’ ‘Christ in you,’’ ‘‘to me to 
live is Christ,’’ ‘‘that Christ may dwell in your hearts 
by faith.’’ Paul writes, it is true, that he determined 
‘“to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him erucified,’’ 
when he preached in Corinth, but he is careful, in speak- 
ing of ‘‘the crucified’’ to use, not the aorist tense, which 
would have pointed back to a historical event, past and 
over, but the perfect tense, which prolongs and makes the 
action or the suffering continuous down to the present 
moment.’ To put it graphically, Paul does not speak of 
Christ as one whose crucifixion is over, but as one whose 
crucifixion is still going on. Just once in his letters 
does he use the aorist, saying, ‘‘He was crucified,’’ and 
there he adds, ‘‘in weakness,’’ which makes it clear that 
what he counts to be of saving power about the death 
of Christ is not the event itself, but the present, vital, 
spiritual meaning of that death. Always, I repeat, his 
religion is to Paul present, vital, spiritual. 

The truth is, the Church and its theological leaders 
have been all too ready to take as central what to Paul 
was part of the whole circle of truth; and to take as 
literal what he meant to be taken as gorgeous, illuminat- 
ing pictures. Paul had a particular problem as a states- 
man-missionary to meet, and he met it magnificently. 
He was faced with the problem of the cross. How could 
the Messiah who was to come in glory and for victory 
ever have been put to death? The problem was in- 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 131 


tensified for Paul by the fact that loyal Hebrews looked 
for a Messiah to free them from the yoke of Rome: and 
he had a Messiah to present to them stigmatized with the 
shameful marks of Roman cruelty and tyranny. Had 
Rome conquered? How could this tragedy of the cross 
be explained ? 

There is plain proof in the opening sections of the 
Acts, that the primitive leaders of the Church found and 
used a hasty and inadequate solution: The Messiah had 
come to establish the Kingdom, but His people were 
not ‘‘willing in the day of His power.’’ The leaders, 
Jewish and Roman, put Him out of the way. Even so, 
men must not think that the cross on which He was 
put to death would sink out of sight or be forgotten. 
It would have a tremendous effect, as time went on, in 
econvineing men of sin—for what sin could be so hei- 
nous as that of killing God’s own Anointed, and thwart- 
ing His mission? That defeat of the cross would prove 
to be temporary. Through the moral and spiritual effect 
wrought by the life and death of Jesus, the Messiah, 
upon the people of God, they would become changed, 
and prepared to receive Him. Then the Christ would 
come back to do the work He could not do for the hard- 
ness of men’s hearts in His first visit from the heavens. 

That is the explanation which meets us in the dis- 
courses of Peter, recorded in the opening chapters of the 
Acts. And Paul’s sermons, as reported in that book, 
reflect the same point of view. His earliest epistles also 
make much of the apocalyptic expectation of Christ’s 
return. A verse in the epistle to the Hebrews” states 
this primitive conception of the meaning of Christ’s 

° Hebrews ix. 28. 


132 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


death with unmistakable clearness: ‘‘Christ also having 
been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear 
a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for 
Him, unto salvation.’’ 

But He did not return. The years went on. Chris. 
tians began to see what Jesus saw so clearly, and taught 
so cogently, that Christianity is in the world to save the 
world, not as a mere interim ethic or religion. The old 
problem pressed anew*for solution: How could the 
cross, the shameful death of the Anointed One, be har- 
monized with the great doctrine of salvation through 
new fullness of life? The resurrection had been in- 
stantly preached; its connection with the great basic 
truth of new fullness of life by the grace of God was 
so clear and close that no one could mistake it. But 
why the death? What could be done to make this 
tragedy, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness 
to Greeks, congruous with the Christian message of life 
and joy. 

Paul saw the great truth of how this could be done. 
Two mighty currents of thought and feeling, streaming 
down from the past, offered their analogies to him and 
powerfully suggested the way out. One of them was the 
elaborate and majestic system of sacrifice, developed 
through the history of the Hebrew people, and enor- 
mously emphasized and enlarged by later Judaism. 
Within this system of outward offerings had arisen in 
a few lofty prophetic souls an inspired vision of the in- 
ner meaning of service and sacrifice, a vision gloriously 
set forth in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, * a passage 
which seems to have been vividly before the mind of 


®°@f. Luke xxii, 37. 


THE NEW TESTAMENT ph 


Jesus Himself and to have been instantly appropriated 
by the followers of Christ as especially applicable to 
Him, and strikingly fulfilled in Him. Their earliest 
name for their Master, after his death, indeed was ‘‘the 
Servant.’’ All this was before the mind of Paul. But, 
knowing as he did also the world of his time outside 
of Palestine, he felt the force of the appeal that the 
‘“mystery-religions,’’? which made much of the symbol- 
ism of life through death and of the approach to God 
through blood and by means of mystic rites, were mak- 
ing to the Hellenic world. These two powerful influences 
worked upon the mind of that age, and especially upon 
the sensitive soul of Paul. He pointed out to Jew and 
Greek that the death of Christ was the fulfillment of that 
which they both had been seeking, the Jew with his 
sacrifices, the Greek with his mysteries. And, with his 
brilliant, impassioned, imaginative power, he set forth, 
under all possible figures, this justification and glorifica- 
tion of the death of God’s Chosen, the one sacrifice for 
sin, the one supreme example of the great truth that 
new fullness of life, the perfect ransom of enslaved 
souls, comes through death. It was a glorious truth, 
presented with matchless power and with vivid insight. 
It .is the supreme instance of his missionary method of 
‘‘being all things to all men, that he might by all means 
save some.’’ To the Jew he became a Jew, to the Greek 
a Greek; to both he made known the deep meaning of 
the crucifixion in a way that harmonized with their 
differing inheritance. In thus meeting the problem 
and satisfying the thought and feeling of his own day, 
He gave a lasting setting to eternal truth. But we must 
not mistake the rich and varied colors and forms of the 


134 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


setting for the deep, eternal truth. We may be sure that 
the apostle who so eagerly appealed to the mind of his 
own day would be the first eagerly to champion the right 
of Christ’s servants today to present the eternal salvation 
of Christ in terms that appeal to present ways of think- 
ing and feeling. Is it not plain also that this determined 
opponent of legalism would vehemently protest against 
having his gospel presented today as if its legalistic and 
governmental setting were the very essence of it? 

It must be clear to all who study the mind of Paul 
at first hand, with sympathy and true insight, that to 
him, all the way through, the essence of the Gospel, 
the very heart of Christianity, was not any legal process 
or commercial transaction, but communion with God, 
fellowship with the Spirit, sharing in the grace of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. The cross is the means to this end; 
but the end is always more than the means. Being a 
Christian meant to Paul living with God. ‘‘The law of 
the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from 
the law of sin and of death.’’ ‘‘If any man be in Christ, 
he is a new creature.’’ ‘‘Christ in you is the hope of 
glory.’’ ‘‘Christ liveth in me.’’ This is the note reso- 
nant in every epistle, in every sentence; this is the 
essence of Christianity as Paul perceives and knows it. 
To him, as to his Master, eternal life meant to know God, 
to live with God in the joy of obedience and love, 
through the grace of God revealed in Christ Jesus our 
Lord. 

At heart, down in the deeps of Christian experience, 
Paul is wholly at one with his Master and ours. The 
liberal Christian has this immense advantage over his 
ultra-conservative brother, that he finds no real dif- 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 135 


ference between the message in the Gospels and the mes- 
sage in the Epistles. The seeming differences are all on 
the surface, in the setting and presentation. But the 
real, deep meaning of the Christian Gospel is the same 
all through the New Testament, the same down through 
the ages, the same among all races—life, eternal life, 
from God, through Christ His Son, our Lord. 

Paul came to God through Christ in his own way. 
Vehement, passionate, temperamental, poetic to a high 
degree, it was natural that his religious experience 
should have been marked by violent clashes and revul- 
sions. He came, as so many must come if they are to be 
saved, to the place where he ‘‘burned what once he 
had adored, and adored what once he had burned.’’ In 
sharp contrast to Paul, Jesus Himself found God by 
another way, the way of serene, childlike appropriation. 
Two children in the same household may live with their 
loving father or mother, the one violently, passionately, 
rebelling and then repenting, the other in calm, serene, 
unbroken comradeship. Who shall say that either is 
wrong? If one comes to the Father, is received, and 
lives gladly with Him, that is enough. Thank God for 
the many ways that lead to Him. However one comes, 
through storm and stress, or as the natural outgrowth of 
normal experience, it is the fellowship, the life, that 
counts. 

To Paul as to Jesus, the Christian is a new creature 
whose faith works in love, because God dwells with him 
and in him. So intensely does Paul feel this to be the 
very center and essence of the Christian experience, that 
even the facts of the life of Jesus, through which he has 
come to know God, are seen by him as active and present 


136 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


rather than past. Christ ‘‘is,’’ and not ‘‘was,’’ crucified. 
We know Him after the flesh no more; we know Him as 
a dear and vital presence. The cross is here, and by it I 
am crucified to the world, and the world to me. 

The core of Paul’s faith is found above all in the con- 
stantly recurring phrase ‘‘in Christ,’’ which is found in 
His writings some one hundred and sixty times. This is, 
in truth, as has been said, ‘‘really the characteristic ex- 
pression of his Christianity.’’ Here is the heart of his 
body of doctrine; nothing else is so vital, so necessary, 
so central. 

All through the New Testament this is Christianity, 
this is salvation, this redemption: to know God in 
personal fellowship, through faith in Jesus Christ 
through whose life, teaching, death, and resurrection, or 
rather, let us say, through the personality that comes to 
full expression in these experiences, the grace of God 
comes afresh every age, every day, every moment, bring- 
ing fullness and freeness of life. And the most essential 
thing about Jesus Christ, that through which He is ‘‘the 
wisdom of God and the power of God,’’ is not that He 
did thus and so in the past, but that He does ‘‘in me’’ 
what I need now. In that Paul, Peter, John, all agree: 
and in that they are all one with the mind of Jesus 
Himself. 

And that is the faith of liberal Christianity. It finds 
life, salvation, in a vital experience of fellowship with 
God, through Jesus Christ. The cross of Christ speaks 
of love unbounded, sacrifice unstinted, pardon unlimited. 
To the legally minded it means acquittal; to the com- 


mercially minded it means cancellation of a debt; to the 


soul enslaved to the world, oppressed by the tyranny of 


—— 


THE NEW TESTAMENT 137 


things, it means ransom, enlargement, liberty. Under 
all these forms, in and through them all, it means grace, 
love, unlimited personal interest of God in us men and 
our salvation. And no one has any right to attempt to 
bind that grace to one form of expression, or to set bars 
before all ways but the way that appeals to him. The 
One in whom we trust is, as He was so clearly seen to be 
by the great apostle, not dead, but living: ‘‘crucified 
through weakness, but alive through the power of God.’’ 
It may not be without significance that the Romanist 
has a crucifix, the Protestant an empty cross. The 
Christ of the authoritarian is forever hanging at the 
point of death. The Christ of the liberal has left death 
behind, for the fullness and glory of His risen life. And 
that is the Christ of the New Testament. We do not go 
back for Him: we go on with Him. 

Liberal Christianity believes that it rests on the New 
Testament, on the real teaching of the Lord Jesus, of 
Paul, and of the other early leaders of the church. To 
its critics, and to all who misunderstand or mistrust it, 
it says this quiet but determined word: 

Go to the sources; take the New Testament, uncolored 
by particular theological preconceptions; take it as it is, 
in the light of the best and most reverent scholarship ; 
and if it ean be shown that liberal Christianity, in its 
main positions and views, is inconsistent with the teach- 
ing of the New Testament, as a whole, we shall humbly 
confess our error, and seek the way shown us by our 
Lord and His followers in whom His Spirit dwelt. But, 
until we are so convinced of error, not from the ereeds, 
not by argument or threat, but from the plain, clear 
statements of the New Testament itself, we, believing 


138 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


ourselves to be at heart one with our Lord and with 
His first interpreters, must obey God rather than men, 
and stand joyfully by that way of thinking of God and 
living with God which seems to us so clearly in harmony 
with the spirit and meaning of the main currents of 


thought and feeling in the authoritative sources of our 4 


faith. 





CHAPTER V 


LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGIOUS HOPE OF 
THE WORLD 


Ir what has thus far been said of liberal Christianity 
is true—indeed if even a part of it is true—then its right 
to be considered a true phase of Christianity and to 
live its life and do its work in the world and in the 
Christian Church freely cannot be questioned. It is an 
honorable and valuable part of the normal development 
of the Christian religion. 

But those who hold to the positions of liberal Chris- 
tianity with conviction and assurance, claim far more 
for this modern movement than that it has a right to 
exist and to work unmolested amid other forms and 
phases of Christianity. They are very sure in their 
hearts, and do not hesitate to proclaim it openly and 
positively, that liberal Christianity is indispensable to 
religious progress and influence today, indeed that it 
has a supreme function to perform. It is, they believe, 
in very large measure, and in a sense that can be predi- 
cated of no other movement, the religious hope of the 
world of our day. 

It is the presence and strength of this conviction that 
makes them tenacious in their faith, and bold in its proc- 
lamation. They are attacked and subjected to a cross- 
fire from those whom we have called the authoritarians 
and those others whom we have called the humanitarians. 

139 


140 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


They are asked why they continue to disturb the peace 
of the Church, why they cannot let it rest satisfied with 
accepted doctrines and customs. Or, if they really mean 
to hold fast to the new beliefs, and feel compelled to take 
the new ways, why do they not frankly say so, leave 
the old Church, and, as it is often put, ‘‘go to the Uni- 
tarians with whom they belong.’’ Liberals are sometimes 
tempted to make the retort which is obvious, and would 
be at least as fair as the charge against themselves, that 
the fundamentalists ought to leave the evangelical Prot- 
estant churches which they are keeping stirred up with 
their appeals to strife, and go to the Roman Church, 
where they belong. But in fact the liberal Christian 
knows that he is not a Unitarian, and that his funda- 
mentalist brother is not a Romanist, whatever each may 
say of the other in heated moments. 

Liberals are at heart evangelical, and that which at 
bottom they hold in common with other true evangeli- 
eals is far more significant than that which divides 
them. The liberal Christian believes with all his heart 
that ‘‘God was in Christ’’ in a sense that never has been 
and never can be true of anyone or anything else; he 
is sure that God is still ‘‘in Christ’’ for man’s salvation. 
He trusts for salvation not in good works, but in the 
good grace of God. His final appeal is to the Word of 
God, not to traditions of the Fathers, nor to decisions 
of the Church; and to the Christian conscience rather 
than to courts or councils. In short, he is a Protestant. 
He believes that all that makes him a liberal Christian 
makes him more truly a Protestant. The spirit and 
meaning and historic positions of evangelicalism are 
inexpressibly dear to him. And he is very sure that, 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 141 


while he looks at some things as his fathers did not look 
at them, and says some things differently, he is never- 
theless heartily at one with the past supporters of true 
evangelical Christianity in all the essentials of their 
spirit and thinking. 

It would be a pleasure to enter here into a compara- 
tive study of evangelicalism and liberal Christianity. 
For at heart they are one. Fundamentalism spends its 
time caring for the outgrown shell; the living substance 
of evangelical faith and experience is in that vital 
fellowship with God in Christ which we have seen to 
be the very heart of liberal Christianity. We can only 
stop in passing to cite a single example—that central 
doctrine of salvation to which we gave attention in the 
last chapter. Here the liberal Christian is heartily one 
with the evangelical Christian. For it would be hard 
to find a statement of what salvation involves and of 
the way of its coming that would be more satisfactory to 
the liberal Christian than that found in the definitions 
of ‘‘faith’’ and ‘‘repentance’’ in the Westminster 
Shorter Catechism. They are represented there as es- 
sentials to salvation, as that which God requires of us 
‘‘that we may escape the wrath and curse due to us for 
sin.’? What stronger statement could there be of their 
essential, vital character? ‘‘Faith in Jesus Christ’’ is 
defined as ‘‘a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest 
upon Him alone for salvation, as He is offered to us in 
the Gospel.’’ A better statement of what the lberal 
Christian means by the faith that saves could not be 
framed. He ‘‘receives and rests upon,’’ not assertions 
about Jesus Christ, or doctrines concerning Jesus Christ, 
but Jesus Christ Himself, as offered to us, not in the 


142 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


creeds, but ‘‘in the Gospel.’’ That describes saving 
faith as the liberal Christian sees it. And always cou- 
pled with it in the outworkings of salvation is the spirit- 
ual and moral experience of ‘‘repentance unto life,’’ 
blended of ‘‘a true sense of sin,’’ ‘‘apprehension of the 
mercy of God in Christ,’’ ‘‘grief and hatred of sin,’’ 
‘‘turning unto God,’’ and ‘‘full purpose of and en- 
deavor after new obedience.’’ The liberal Christian 
does not ask a better.definition than that thus given in 
those simple straight terms of his conception of the 
way by which man finds salvation and life through 
Christ in God. 

It is, of course, always precarious to attempt to say 
what the great men of past times would be and do were 
they living today. But the liberal Christian cannot 
read the sayings of Luther and Calvin, or study the 
writings of the Westminister divines, without a strong 
conviction forming in his mind that, were these men 
living and working in the Church today, they would be 
found leading the advance guard of theological thinking 
and experience as they led it in their own time. He 
feels that their spirit is one with his own. If we do 
see further, to them should go the credit, because we 
stand on their shoulders. The liberal Christian is very 
sure that the spirit and point of view of the leaders of 
the past is well expressed in the words with which John 
Robinson said farewell to the little company of Pilgrims 
when they were about to leave Holland: 


We are now ere long to part asunder, and the Lord 
knoweth whether I shall live to see your faces again. 
But whether the Lord hath appointed it or not, I 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 143 


charge you before God and His blessed angels, to 
follow me no further than I have followed Christ; and 
if God should reveal anything to you by any other in- 
strument of His, to be as ready to receive it as ever you 
were to receive the truth by my ministry ; for I am very 
eonfident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to 
break forth out of His holy Word. I bewail the con- 
dition of the Reformed churches, who are come to a 
period in religion and will go no further than the 
instruments of their reformation. The Lutherans can- 
not be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; for what- 
ever part of God’s will has been imparted and revealed 
to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it. And 
the Calvinists, as you see, stick where Calvin left 
them. This is a misery much to be lamented; for 
though Luther and Calvin were precious shining lights 
in their times, yet God did not reveal His whole will 
to them; and were they living now they would be as 
ready and willing to embrace further light as that 
which they had received. I beseech you to remember 
your church covenant, at least that part of it whereby 
you promise and covenant with God and with one 
another to receive whatsoever light or truth shall be 
made known to you from the written Word of God. 


The liberal Christian is confident that deeper study 
of the Word of God, and a better knowledge of the 
spirit of Protestantism, would lead all the Protestant 
Churches to make room gladly and unreservedly for 
liberal Christians in their ranks. 

Much of that for which liberal Christians stand seems 
to them to be clearly of the very essence and spirit of 


144 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


the Christian religion. They are contending for the 
heart of the New Testament. They can no more keep 
still about it than could Peter and John when ordered 
by the Council not to preach again or speak in the name 
of the Lord Jesus. 

Is this a mistaken estimate? Is it an overbold, or 
fantastic claim, thus to hold that liberal Christianity 
is the religious hope of the world? 

Certainly we are living today in a world that needs 
saving. It isin desperate need of any and every agency 
that shows promise of being able to pull it out of the 
pit and set it on its feet and on the right path. A 
dozen years ago it was not hard to maintain a blithe 
and cheerful optimism, an easy belief that all would 
go well just through the outworking of nature. There 
was much confident talk about man’s mastery over na- 
ture, and an easy confidence in Progress, as a sort of 
beneficent good fairy who would waft us into the King- 
dom of God if only we would lie back and let her do 
the work. No one but a fool can believe such things 
now. We were fools and blind to believe them then; 
but it is criminal folly to think in that way now. We 
have had our eyes opened to the fact that material prog- 
ress carries with it not the slightest guarantee of real 
advance; that not only the inventions and discoveries 
in the material realm, but the intellect itself, and all 
that we boastfully call ‘‘enlightenment,’’ are but a set 
of morally indifferent instruments that can be used by 
either the righteous or the wicked for the more effective 
accomplishment of their respective and opposed ends. 
Every new fact ascertained, every new law of nature 
discovered, every advance registered in knowledge and 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 145 


skill and the power to control natural forces, may only 
enable devilish men to make a world more cursed and 
miserable. The God of truth who has opened to us 
this marvelous wealth of modern knowledge says, as of 
old, ‘‘Behold, I have set before you this day life and 
death, the blessing and the curse Wherefore choose 
life.”? Man stands amid these mighty new forces and 
facts with the dread alternative confronting him of 
either subduing them to spiritual uses or letting them 
smother and strangle him till his spirit dies. 

The supreme peril of our present world may be put 
in a sentence: We are in danger of being wrecked and 
destroyed by mechanism grown beyond the power of 
the human spirit to control and direct. I use the word 
‘‘mechanism’’ in a large sense, to include social ma- 
chinery, organization, co-operative actions, as well as 
the enormous multiplication of instruments whereby nat- 
ural forces are brought into play and use. Man today 
is little more than a child left free to play as he will with 
high-powered, destructive toys; a child excited, eager, 
but too immature to use them safely and for right ends. 

Much of our use of this rapidly growing mass of ma- 
terial instruments and natural forces, where it is not 
outwardly destructive, is wasteful and enervating to 
the better nature of man. We are taking the material 
that might build the New Jerusalem and wasting it on 
fads and follies. This has come to be matter of common 
talk, and even a constantly recurring subject of jest in 
the comic papers. Man finds the amazing secret of 
broadeasting speech far and wide, only to use it to send 
out through the ether silly bedtime stories and inane 
jazz music; he learns how to mount into the air with 


146 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


wings, and write on the sky with letters a mile high, 
and has nothing better to write there, for millions to 
see at once, than the name of a cigarette. The automo- 
bile is the most effective ally of the highwayman. If he 
would not be destroyed by the works of his hands, man 
must come to learn thé truth of Kant’s dictum, that in 
all the world there is nothing really good but good 
will. 

As compared with our fathers, we have at our dis- 
posal amazing devices for saving time and strength. 
But what of the character of the uses to which we put 
the time and strength we save? The question of what 
is to be done with our increasing leisure is a crucial 
question. <A thoughtful Chinese was visiting an Ameri- 
can whose home was in a suburb of New York. The host 
looked at his watch, and remarked: ‘‘If we hurry we 
ean catch an express.’’ They hastened along, almost 
at a run; they rushed through the gate at the station; 
they caught the train just as it started; and, as they 
sank down in the seat, the American said: ‘‘We have 
saved fifteen minutes by eatching this train.’? ‘‘Ah,”’ 
said the Chinese gentleman, ‘‘and what are we going 
to do with it now we have saved it?’’ That ‘‘Satan 
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do’’ may be 
not only a nursery rhyme, but a terrible truth. Man 
will never get far, never be safe, he will only sink fur- 
ther and further into the mire of perdition the more he 
gets and knows and can do, until he learns that it is 
the soul that gives the right tone to it all, that man does 
not live by bread alone, or by knowledge alone, but by 
the grace of the Living God; that, until the soul is 
right, nothing is right. 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 147 


Yet science is here to stay; modern knowledge cannot 
be swept aside by any uprising of faith; and if it could, 
the world of men would be inestimably the losers by the 
process. What the world needs most, and must have, 
is a faith that can master the forces that have been let 
loose in our modern life; a faith that can keep the spirit 
of man strong, well-poised, dominant, masterful, amid 
the riot of new facts and forces that deafen and dazzle 
the soul. Henry Adams, that strange representative of 
much that is in the mind and heart of the modern man, 
put the case forcibly, when he wrote: 


“Crossing the hostile seas, our eager band 
Saw hills and forests rising in the blue: 

Our Father’s Kingdom in the Promised Land$ 
We seized it—and dethroned the Father, too. 


And now we are the Father, with our brood, 
Ruling the infinite, not Three but One; 

We made our world, and saw that it was good; 
Ourselves we worship, and we have no Son. 


Yet we have Gods, for even our strong nerve 
Falters before the energy we own; 

Which shall be master? Which of us shall serve? 
Which wear the fetters? Which shali bear the crown? 


Brave though we be, we dread to face the Sphynx, 
Or answer the old riddle she still asks. 

Strong aS we are, our reckless courage shrinks 
To look beyond the piecework of our tasks.” 


There is such a thing as gaining the whole world and 
losing the soul in the doing of it; and it exactly describes 
the peril that threatens modern society. ‘‘I eame to 
east fire on the earth,’’ said Jesus, in words strangely 
prophetic. The world is on fire, and is blazing furiously, 


148 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


with a fire compounded of a thirst for freedom, for 
democracy, for knowledge both of things visible and 
invisible, for equality ; ablaze wherever the emancipating 
touch of the spirit and mind of Christ has been felt by 
the soul of man. You cannot take the New Testament 
and its Christ into any corner of the world and not 
thereby set these flames going. Men are not plagued 
with industrialism, with communism, with socialism, with 
submarines and lethal gases, with impatient and revo- 
lutionary outbreaks in heathen lands, as they are where 
Christ has touched the spirit of man and set it free. 
This modern world, with its whirling mass of high ten- 
sion forces, has been set on fire by His spirit. 

Yet the fire is by no means all; indeed it is but a small 
part of that which He came to bring. No sooner had 
He said ‘‘I came to cast fire on the earth,’’ than He 
went on to exclaim: ‘‘but I have a baptism to be bap- 
tized with; and how am I straitened till it be accom- 
plished.’’ He came bringing, also, a spirit that could 
control and master the fire, a faith that could use to 
the glory of God the mighty forces developed by the 
intellect of man freely working on the facts of this 
wonderful world. The trouble with the world is that 
it has taken the fire without the faith; the free spirit 
has not become the godly, the sacrificial spirit. Man’s 
soul must be mastered by the faith, or both his world 
and he will be consumed by the fire. | 

Whence shall we men derive the spiritual energy suf- 
ficient to overcome and master these titanic forces and 
facts of our modern world? Not from science itself. 
There is no hope there. The best we get from Christless 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 149 


science and philosophy is a dogged and unreasonable 
appeal to the human spirit to live by its best ideals, in 
spite of the fact that science offers no good foundation 
for them, and nothing to set our hopes on in the long 
future. Bertrand Russell tells us what we may expect 
if we take science as the final word: we may then be 
very sure that 


‘*Man is the product of causes which had no previs- 
ion of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his 
growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliets, 
are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; 
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or 
feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the 
grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, 
all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of hu- 
man genius, are destined to extinction in the vast 
depths of the solar system; and that the whole temple 
of man’s achievement must inevitably be burned be- 
neath the debris of a universe in ruins. 


And, on the basis of these facts, we have nothing 
brighter to look forward to than this gloomy picture: 


‘“The life of man is a long march through the night, 
surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness 
and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach, 
and where none may tarry long. 

Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all 
his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. 
Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnip- 
otent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man 


150 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow him- 
self to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains 
only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty 
thoughts that ennoble his little day.’’ 


Why cherish these lofty thoughts? It is strange 
that with his keen mind this writer does not perceive the 
utter absurdity of clinging to high thoughts and fine 
ideals in a world that ends in extinction alike for the 
high and low, and for ideals as well as for persons. It 
is not strange that he should disregard in his own life 
the principles of sex morality maintained by mankind 
at such cost and by such desperate struggle and self- 
denial through the ages. If this is the voice of science, 
no hope is to be found there for the higher life of man. 

Only Christ can control and master and set to noble 
uses the forces Christ has released. That is the deep 
conviction of every true Christian, and the mind and 
heart of the world seems to be turning in its direction 
more and more. Modern science has come to stay. That 
does not mean that all its present conclusions and hy- 
potheses will be justified, or that they will remain un- 
challenged. ‘‘Our little systems have their day, and — 
cease to be’’ in science and philosophy no less than in 
theology. But we shall go on, not back, for the basic 
principles on which modern science has worked with 
such amazing results thus far are part of the ever- 
lasting rock of truth. The scientific spirit and method 
will last as long as the material world endures. 

Is it then presumptuous to assert that the faith des- 
tined surely to mastery over the future is a faith able 
to live with modern science on terms of mutual respect 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 151 


and hearty co-operation? Any form of religion which 
meets this modern world with nothing but distrust for 
its truths and processes and mighty affirmations, any 
religion that hides itself away in sanctuaries while the 
mighty world of modern thought and activity goes roar- 
ing on its way outside, must be content to be simply a 
haven of refuge for those driven by the uproar to flee 
for relief to a blind and irrational faith. In such an 
age authoritarian Christianity can be no more than a 
life-saving service, stationed along the shores of wild 
seas of thought and feeling and action, to pick up those 
who have lost heart and given up the struggle, when 
what is urgently needed is an intrepid Christianity that 
can master the waves and brave the storms and provide 
the spiritual life of men safe and sure passage on and. 
over that sea, bringing them at last to their haven in 
the commonwealth of God. 

There is little or nothing to be expected from the 
humanitarian type of religion. In order to meet and 
prove more than a match for the sins and perils, the 
facts and forces, of our present world, ‘‘A God must 
mingle in the game.’’ Human nature is not strong 
enough in itself. It is a critical time, a time for crying 
out to God who alone can save in so needy a day; time 
for ‘‘taking the whole armor of God,’’ for the fight is 
no wrestling match, but a life-and-death struggle with 
the ‘‘powers of this age.”’ 


“Thou ship of earth, with death and birth and life and sex 
aboard ; 
And fires of desires burning hotly in the hold; 
I fear thee, oh, I fear thee, for I hear the tongue and sword 
At battle on the deck, and the wild mutineers are bold. 


152 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


The dewdrop morn may fall from off the petal of the sky; 
But all the deck is wet with blood, and stains the crystal red; 
A pilot, God! A pilot! for the helm is left awry; 
And the best sailors in the ship lie there among the dead.” 


The only saving power the world has ever known is 
religion. The Christian is very sure that the only power 
that can save the world today is the religion of Christ, 
the Christ Who is living in our life today. He is the 
one pilot. And we need to see Him, not only later when 
we cross the bar, but now. The liberal Christian is 
sure that the most potent form of Christianity today, 
in which lies the best and most reasonable hope of sal- 
vation for the world, is liberal Christianity, the religion 
of the spirit, a free, fearless faith in the God whom, 
Jesus reveals as the great Reality in and back of the 
world in which we live. This faith alone can fulfill the 
wonderful prophecy of one of its noblest expounders, 
that the creation, looking expectantly for the revealing 
of the sons of God, shall at last be delivered from the 
bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of 
the sons of God (Romans viii. 19). 

This world of today will cling to modern science. It 
follows that the form of religion that will best meet its 
needs and save it from its dangers and sins will be a 
religion that honors and frankly adopts the spirit and 
method of modern science. And it is simple matter of 
fact that Christianity is the only religion that has made, 
or is making, any serious attempt to adapt itself to 
modern science. Liberal Christianity is that form of 
Christianity which is adapting itself to modern thought, 
and this makes it the religious hope of the world. 

The modern world believes in letting men know the 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 153 


truth. Indeed it believes that it is not permanently pos- 
sible to keep men from knowing the truth and that the 
fuller their knowledge, and the more rapidly they ean 
attain it, the more hope there is for mankind. 

The Church of Christ can exert its full influence over 
the world of our day only by giving full recognition to 
the rights of scientific study, and to the beauty of knowl- 
edge. Society as a whole has passed the point where it 
is possible for authorities of any sort, political or ecclesi- 
astical, to set bounds to what men should try to know. 
The net result of attempted interference on the part of 
religious bodies with the processes of public education, 
and of the theological dogmatism of the past, is: the 
general conviction that religion must be rigidly ruled 
out from our systems of public education, and an in- 
creasing neglect of religion as an element in all our 
educational processes, both public and private. 

Yet there are signs of an awakening to the danger 
lurking in this neglect of moral and religious training 
in our educational processes. Thus far it has spent itself 
largely on pieas to the home and the Church to supply 
what the school fails to do. But some educators and 
some other leaders of civic and social life are also be- 
ginning to show an interest in the difficult question 
how the public schools and the colleges and universities 
can provide moral and religious training without suc- 
cumbing to the perils of sectarianism or endangering 
true freedom of thought and expression. Keen observers 
of the present situation have for some time thought that 
ere long the colleges may have to take into their own 
hands the matter of devising forms of religious belief 
and practice for their students, independently of what 


154 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


the Churches might hold or urge. Should the present 
sectarian strife and ecclesiastical narrowness become 
much more rampant, reducing the Churches thereby to 
an even more helpless and hopeless condition of inability 
to provide religious leadership and inspiration to the 
universities, the universities may be forced to work out 
their own independent developments of religious faith 
and practice. It would be unfortunate to have such a 
divoree occur between: college and Church; but it would 
be still more unfortunate for our colleges to continue a 
‘‘hands off’’ policy while Church bodies attack or dis- 
parage modern knowledge, and otherwise show their lack 
of capacity for genuine co-operation with our modern 
institutions of learning. There was a time when the 
universities led in the development of theological 
thought; and it was a time of noble progress in Chris- 
tian, thinking. 

There has been much complaint in Church eircles 
over the fact that so many of our choice college-bred 
young men and young women are out of touch with the 
Church, and indisposed to invest their time and talents 
in the means and opportunities of service which the 
Church offers. It has been generally assumed that the 
colleges and universities are wholly at fault by reason 
of the irreligious or non-religious character of their 
teaching. We have heard much talk about our ‘‘god- 
less’’ colleges. I believe that many, if not most, of 
those Churchmen who have come close to college boys 
and girls in the last score of years would agree with me 
in the judgment that the fault lies with the Churches far 
more than with the schools. There are faults in the 
colleges, serious faults. There are too many men and 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 155 


women in positions of influence, particularly in faculties 
of philosophy and science, who exhibit a careless, or 
even an antagonistic, attitude toward religion. The 
Church has a right to ask that steps be taken to correct 
such a condition in any college. Exactly as no one 
would be tolerated in any teaching position who did not 
thoroughly respect the scientific method and spirit, so 
no one should be tolerated in any teaching position who 
does not respect the religious spirit. We are advocating 
no infringement of academic freedom. In the one ease, 
as in the other, the good and defensible reason for this 
insistence is that the scientific spirit and the religious 
spirit are both essential to the making of a good citizen. 

But far more of the fault than can be justly laid at 
the door of the colleges lies back in the Churches. We 
bring up boys and girls in a faith that cannot possibly 
live on good terms with modern science; we shirk the 
real living questions that they must soon meet; then 
we send them to schools where all the teaching is based 
on modern science, and expect them, while struggling 
with a bewildering mass of new knowledge that comes 
upon them, to work out for themselves some sort of 
principle of compromise or accommodation, whereby 
their religious faith may live on, intact and strong, quite 
apart from what they learn to be the truth about the 
world in which they live. It is amazingly inconsistent 
the way in which themost rigid upholders of reactionary 
theology will eagerly send their children to the ‘‘best’’ 
schools and colleges, 7.e., those institutions where the 
highest standard of scientific instruction obtains. If 
modern science is wrong, pernicious, misleading, why 
do they not send these precious young souls to institu- 


156 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


tions which still cling to ancient forms and ways and 
dogmas in all the subjects taught ? 

Not only must youths go through this painful process 
of adjustments that will not stay adjusted between the 
erude and old-fashioned religious tradition previously 
taught them in their homes and Churches and the new 
knowledge to which they are introduced in the college 
halls; but in many eases, after these years of intellectual 
erowth and enlightenment, they must return to a Church 
that still clings to beliefs that clash with what their 
keen young minds have found to be true elsewhere; and 
too often to an atmosphere of suspicion toward their 
different point of view. Not a few cases have come to 
my personal knowledge, of young men and young women 
returning to their home Churches after college years, 
and offering their services in the work of the Sunday 
School and church, only to be treated with distrust, or 
to be required to teach views impossible for anyone to 
teach who has accepted the scientific view of facts. And, 
in all such eases, the good people of the Church lament 
the bad influence of the godless college that has cor- 
rupted, as they explain it to themselves, the pure and 
simple faith of the youth. They might as well blame 
the college for the fact that the youth has outgrown his 
little-boy clothes. 

If our boys and girls are to be sent to colleges and 
schools where modern science is the basis of the teach- 
ing, it is not too much to demand that they shall be 
made ready before they go by facing fearlessly and 
naturally, in their Sunday School training and in the 
sermons they hear, the facts of modern scientifie knowl- 
edge. A Church understandingly sympathetic with the 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD ~ 157 


mind and heart of youth, and frank in its dealing with 
all facts and questions, can retain its hold on its young 
people through the difficult period of study and growth, 
and make sure that there will be in their case no dis- 
astrous break between religion and knowledge. 

**To hold knowledge and religion together’’—that is 
the special order of business of our time, as foreseen by 
a wise leader of some years ago. Is it not evident that 
liberal Christianity is best equipped for the task of 
avoiding a split between religious knowledge and other 
knowledge? A religion which believes that all knowl- 
edge belongs to God, and so to the children of God, and 
that none of it therefore is unwholesome fare for the soul 
of man; which fearlessly faces facts, and adapts its sys- 
tems to them; which patiently yet eagerly works to effect 
a sound and thorough adjustment between modern 
thought and the unchangeable principles and ideals and 
spiritual experiences of the Christian life—such a move- 
ment can hold knowledge and religion together. Do the 
champions of authoritarian religion actually expect to 
prevent the spread of knowledge, or force it to fit into 
the mold of their inherited dogmas? Do they really 
think that the welfare of religion can be advanced by 
legislation forbidding the teaching of modern ideas that 
upset ancient thoughts of God and the world? Is it not 
very plain to perceive that a religion which is afraid of 
modern thought, and cannot or will not allow its truths 
to be re-expressed in modern categories, is entering on 
a hopeless contest with the present age? The modern 
world is committed to the fullest cultivation and pursuit 
of education. The only religion that can appeal to it, 
or live respected and dominant in it, is a religion which 


158 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


fosters investigation and gives it free rein, not a religion 
that fears and restricts it. For the sake alike of the 
colleges and of the Churches, and for the sake of the 
soul and society of man, we must work out a cordial 
relationship between the college and the Church, between 
man’s best knowledge and his highest faith. That means 
that only a Christianity in harmony with modern ways 
of thinking has any real chance. Liberal Christianity 
is the religious hope of the world. 

The modern world trusts also in democracy. Less is 
being said on this theme than was said a few years ago. 
The word was then overworked, and it is natural that 
it should take a vacation. But the lessened use of the 
word does not mean that faith in democracy has grown 
less in the human heart. 

An age committed to democracy will not respond very 
readily to any form of absolutism in religion. Authori- 
tarianism, in either of its forms, has lost its hold upon 
it. The modern world must have a religion which makes 
its primary appeal to the common religious sense of 
mankind. Any faith which sets before men presupposi- 
tions which must be blindly accepted before that faith 
ean function, makes little appeal to the mind of our 
time. We must have, in a very real though somewhat 
limited sense, a Christianity content to rest its power 
on the suffrages of mankind. That does not mean, of 
course, anything so absurd as that men shall ever come 
to vote what shall be believed as Christian truth, the 
majority to rule. Liberal’ Christians certainly do not 
understand it to mean anything so impossible. But it 
does mean to them that the ultimate decision as to what 
is authoritative in religion, as in music, must be cheer- 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 159 


fully, fearlessly, left to the judgment of our common 
humanity. The appeal must always be to ‘‘every man’s 
conscience in the sight of God,’’ the same arbiter to 
which Paul appealed. Science rests on the conviction 
that once facts and the process of their establishment 
are set before intelligent public opinion, they will be 
accepted. It is sure that the unspoiled mind of man is 
ultimately capable of recognizing the truth. Religion 
must be made to rest on a similar basis. It must be 
quite sure that the soul of man is capable ultimately of 
recognizing the truth about God and the soul. It is here 
that liberal Christianity takes its stand in contrast to 
authoritarianism which calls for submission to dogmas 
that are independent of the human soul and conscience 
for their authority. The divine right of creeds cannot 
survive in a day that has done with the divine right of 
kings. The Protestant principle that authority is found 
in the Word of God interpreted by the private judgment 
of the individual soul illumined by the Spirit of God, 
is the principle on which liberal Christianity stands. It 
is the only principle of religious authority that can 
function well in an age devoted to democracy. Liberal 
Christianity is the religious hope of the present age. 
The third dominant idea of our time is wmty. There 
is an irresistible tide and tendency at work in our world 
making toward co-operation, getting together. Hvery 
serious movement of any importance must deal with uni- 
versals, must become a world movement. One of the 
deeply felt needs that men are depending upon religion 
to supply is the need of a unifying power. More and 
more leading men are asserting that there is little or 
no hope of enduring peace, small chance for success in 


160 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


connection with the League of Nations, or any other 
world-organization, unless some common spiritual basis 
ean be found. Christianity alone, among the religions 
of the world, shows any promise of proving to be such 
a unifying force of faith. But it is quite useless to 
hope that the faith that unifies can ever be provided 
by any sectarian movement, any particularistic form of 
Church. 

Christianity, in its dogmatic phases, insistent on par- 
ticular doctrines or practices, has invariably been a 
divisive, not 'a unifying force in the life of the world. 
It is sadly true that unbelievers are able to say, with 
some color of plausibility, that on the whole Christianity 
has been a separating and divisive influence. Only 
when, and as, the great principles and ideals of Christ 
shall be made supreme—the ideals of love, service, sacri- 
fice, freedom, and faith in Christ as the revealer of 
God, of man, and of God in man—vwill Christianity 
prove able to unify. It is becoming increasingly evident 
that there is no hope of attaining unity among the 
various branches of the Church on any basis of a com- 
mon creed, or a common order. Unity must be set up 
on a basis of common service, and common spiritual ex- 
perience. A Church large-hearted enough to say with 
Paul: ‘‘Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus 
Christ in uncorruptness’’; ‘‘No one can eall Jesus Lord 
but in the Holy Spirit’’; ‘‘The greatest of these is love’’ 
—may hold before itself the goal of unity, and so far 
attain it as to prove the powerful unifying force the 
world so sorely needs. 

The objection is sometimes urged that the unity of 
which the liberal Christian talks, and for which he 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 161 


pleads, is in fact altogether too vague, evidence of an 
indifference to truth and willingness to brush aside 
honest differences, and would leave nothing real in 
the way of conviction on which to unite. This is utterly 
untrue to the facts. The liberal Christian is sure that 
in all the world there is nothing so certain, so lasting 
amid all outward changes, so abiding and sound as 
a basis of unity, as is the spiritual experience of the 
soul with God. Loyalty to the Person, Jesus Christ, is 
a far better and firmer basis of united faith and action 
than is any measure of intellectual agreement in defining 
that Personality. 

There could hardly be a more egregious error than to 
suppose that when the liberal Christian pleads for unity 
on the basis of the great essentials of Christian experi- 
ence, and for large liberty on matters connected with 
the intellectual formulation and expression of such es- 
sential experiences, he is an apostle of religious indiffer- 
entism, or is pleading for a false peace maintained 
through a self-stultifying silence. Nowhere in the whole 
theological world will you find anyone more eager to 
provide for the full presentation of differing views, more 
ready for the grapple of mind with mind, more full of 
the joy of good-natured but earnest discussion of varying 
conceptions of truth, than you find among liberal Chris- 
tians. But this is what distinguishes the liberal Chris- 
tian always from the authoritarian—that he wants to 
make certain of ‘‘a fair field and no favor’’ for varying 
and competing views. He has no faith in ecclesiastical 
process as a means of establishing truth. He does not 
seek to make a desert by driving out of the Church 
those who hold other views and ealling it a victory. He 


162 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


wants full liberty of expression, for he is confident that 
the truth does not need adventitious aids to win. 

The authoritarian avers that the liberal Christian is 
indifferent about truth. The liberal Christian replies 
that he is so vitally concerned about truth that he 
cannot consent to any restriction on the free and full 
search for it. He is sure also that all the time men are 
searching freely by intellectual hard labor to improve 
their grasp of truth, they can live together and work 
together in a real unity on the basis of a common spir- 
itual experience, and a common faith in great, present, 
spiritual realities. That way lies real unity. All other 
ways are delusive, or crooked, or hopeless. 

No one vitally interested in the salvation of humanity, 
who believes in Christ as the Savior, can look to the East, 
and watch what is going on in the ancient empires of 
Asia, without a strange thrill. He is at once appalled, 
daunted, excited, allured. How can these awakening 
millions be brought to see Christ and His salvation? 
There is not a shadow of doubt that they will be drawn 
into, the full tide of modern scientific thinking. 

Eagerly they are reaching out to appropriate all the 
knowledge and technical skill that the Western world 
ean offer. With it goes to them much of the agnostic 
and materialistic philosophy that has sprung up here 
in the Western world along with this development of 
modern science. It comes to them with a certain pres- 
tige, and they are lacking in the antidotes supplied by 
the highly ethical religion that Christendom has inher- 
ited. Can this crisis be met by a religion of authority, 
by a Christianity that holds itself aloof from the very 
knowledge which the Orient is eagerly seizing? It is 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 163 


tragic, to see the strength of the determination in somé 
quarters to hold these awakening peoples in leading 
strings, to burden them with the weight of our past theo- 
logical bickerings and misunderstandings, to summon 
them to the defense of doctrines that have no real rela- 
tion to their living experience, under the assurance 
solemnly given by pious but narrow souls that Chris- 
tianity is essentially one with some particular phase of 
belief, identified with a single sect or party; and to 
warn them that Christianity and modern thinking are 
incompatible. It was pathetic in the extreme, a few 
months ago, to observe Bertrand Russell on the one 
hand and certain fundamentalist visitors on the other, 
agreeing in the message to ‘Chinese students that they 
could not hold to both modern science and Christianity, 
but must choose between them. One of the ablest teach- 
ers in a Christian college in China recently confessed, 
out of great depression of spirit, the painful contrast 
which made itself felt on passing from the department 
of science to the theological department in the same in- 
stitution—the glad, free, buoyant, confident spirit of 
eager search for truth in the one; the suspicious, narrow, 
cramped, defensive spirit in the other. _ 

The liberal Christian wishes the study of religion and 
theology earried on with the same freedom, the same 
generous courtesy, the same readiness to honor original 
thinking, the same confidence in the ability. of truth to 
get itself recognized, the same absence of force, the same 
childlikeness of spirit, the same good comradeship of 
all honest souls, that characterize the conduct of scien- 
tific research at its best. Religion pursued in such a 
magnanimous atmosphere would turn into a unifying 


164 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


force. It would be, as no substitute kind of religion 
could be, truly and deeply Christian. Once again, in 
one more sphere of modern interest, liberal Christianity 
is the religious hope of the world. 

But, in saying this, there is an admission to be made, 
and a serious challenge to be offered. This is the admis- 
sion that in speaking of liberal Christianity as the reli- 
gious hope of the world, we have in mind liberal Chris- 
tianity as it might be’and ought to be, rather than as it 
is. Liberal Christianity is not yet capable of discharg- 
ing this great function. I¢ still carries with it too much 
of an academic spirit and atmosphere, too little of the 
spirit of a divine mission. It displays too great a tend- 
ency to emphasize the word ‘“‘liberal’’ rather than the 
greater word ‘‘Christianity.’’ 

If our stand be well taken that a world so desperately 
needing salvation must look to a liberal form of Chris- 
tianity as its best hope, then how tremendous is the 
challenge to those who call themselves liberal Christians 
to play well their part, to awaken to the full conscious- 
ness and realization of their saving mission. Liberal 
Christianity must become, not a theological diversion, but 
a saving mission; not a course of lectures, but a crusade. 
Liberals do well to ask themselves very seriously whether 
the mistrust felt toward them and their views on the 
part of large numbers of Christians the Church over, 
is not in some part deserved, by too plain evidence of 
a lack of passion and devotion in their allegiance to the 
cause of the salvation of man and his world. 

‘¢ Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have 
not the knowledge of God; I speak this to your shame.’’ 
‘‘ We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 165 


in wickedness. And we know that the Son of God is 
come and hath given us a knowledge of Him that is 
true.’? We must make the great surrender to the urge 
that finds strong expression in such words if we really 
intend to be worthy of our mission. 

It is fitting that the last words of an exposition of 
‘‘liberal Christianity’’ should be in the nature of a chal- 
lenge and a call addressed to all who espouse that form 
of the Christian religion. We can make up our minds 
none too soon to address ourselves to the question how 
we may fulfill this function, what is necessary in order 
that we may meet the need of the world. How ean liberal 
Christianity prove the saving force which its nature fits 
it to be? 

First of all, there must ever be in us the right spirit. 
There is no other way. That form of Christianity which 
shows most evidently the presence and power of the 
spirit of Christ will ultimately win the confidence of 
all men. No degree of intellectual superiority, real or 
assumed, no brilliancy of thought or persuasiveness of 
words, will prove to have sufficient power in themselves 
to win true and final approval. The weapons that will 
bring victory are still those Paul displayed when he 
opened his armory: ‘‘In everything commending our- 
selves aS ministers of God, in much patience, in pure- 
ness, in knowledge, in long-suffering [which is simply 
old English for ‘‘good temper’’], in kindness, in the 
Holy Spirit, in love unfeigned, in the word of truth, in 
the power of God; by the armor of righteousness on the 
right hand and on the left.’’ 

Liberal Christianity must be ‘‘filled with the spirit,’’ 
if it is to be equal to its divinely appointed task. It is 


166 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


of undeniably real importance to be theologically cor- 
rect; but it is immensely more so to be spiritually sound. 
The distinguishing marks of the liberal Christian min- 
istry must be spiritual fervor, moral power, saving pas- 
sion. We must learn how to be popular, positive, im- 
passioned, rather than critical, highbrow, and academic. 
There has been too much water and too little fire about 
our liberal Christianity. Too often we have been in 
the true line of succession with those men of the first 
century, who ‘‘knew only the baptism of John.’’ 

We must be on fire with faith and enthusiasm for our 
Gospel. Our function, as has always been the function 
of the Church, is to bring God to men and men to Ged. 
We have a Gospel wonderfully able to supply the one 
thing lacking in the life of the present world. If liberal 
Christianity finds a way to use to the full its dormant 
capabilities, the Christian message of salvation will be 
given to the world ‘‘in spirit and in reality,’’ with a 
power hitherto never experienced. 

To speak the plain truth, Protestantism has never yet 
had, in its official theology, a God good enough to match 
its experience of grace. In Luther, Calvin, Knox, Wes- 
ley, and the rest, the experience of God’s saving grace 
was infinitely superior to the words in which they de- 
seribed it. Protestantism will never have a God good 
enough to match its experience of grace until it exercises 
the courage to find its God wholly, really, sufficiently, 
daringly, in Jesus Christ. That is the God whom 
liberal Christianity is struggling and striving to express. 
We need a new transfiguration experience, like to that 
of the three disciples, in which we shall ‘‘see no man 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 167 


save Jesus only’’; a spirit and mind in which we can 
truly say “‘For us there is but One God, the Father ; and 
One Lord, Jesus Christ.’’ 

If, as we believe, our liberal faith is better and truer 
than the faith held by humanitarians on the one hand, 
and authoritarians on the other, we can prove it 
so, not by any intellectual superiority, real or pretended, 
but by evidencing its superabounding moral and spir- 
itual excellence. It will not do to criticize the positions 
taken by fundamentalists, and stop there. We must 
show them better ways to the ends they seck. We must 
not content ourselves with setting forth the dangerous 


errors contained in the doctrine of an inerrant Bible; . 


we must go on and positively commend the real Bible — 
to men as the practical guidebook for religious experi- 
ence, authenticated by the Spirit that speaks in and 
through it. We must not be content to deprecate the 
importance of the doctrine of the virgin birth of our 
Lord. We must present a Christ so divine that a miracu- 
lous birth shall seem neither strange nor necessary, but 
simply an incident, a particular view to be calmly dis- 
cussed, while our whole souls go out to Him in adoration 
and trust. We must see in Christ no ‘‘spiritual Apollo,’’ 
but the One in fellowship with whom is the only hope 
of salvation from sin, the sin of individuals and the sin 
of the world. We must couple inseparably with our in- 
difference as to the form of His resurrection a deep and 
joyous certainty of His living presence, and of the 
reality of the hope of eternal life. We must not only 
bear our testimony very clearly to the childishness and 
unspirituality of premillennial views; we must, also, 


168 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


pass on to men a triumphant and completely satisfying 
alternative answer to that longing which has in every 
age given life to apocalypticism, the longing of the soul 
of man to know beyond a peradventure that it is not 
part of a closed order, that we are not caught in a me- 
chanical process, that nothing is too good to come true, 
that a Personal God may always be eagerly looked to 
for unpredictable things. We belong to the company of 
those who have learned to ‘‘expect great things from 
God,’’ as well as to ‘‘attempt great things for God.”’ 
Our God, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, is not caged 
in the universe, helplessly entangled in the implacable 
grinding of His own system of laws and forces. The 
Christian believer should always be on the tiptoe of ex- 
pectancy. He is to march on, breast forward, as though 
the Kingdom of God might meet him right around the 
next turn of the road. That is the great spiritual truth 
at the heart of the apocalyptic spirit and message in 
every age. 

Worse than any bondage to old forms of theology is 
bondage to a mechanistic view of life. Christ is fully 
able to deliver us from that bondage. Our Gospel must 
make this known to the ends of the earth. 

It is in such corrective ways that we must meet the 
mistaken views and emphases of those who hold to reac- 
tionary theology; not relying chiefly on criticism, but 
chiefly depending on winning their good will by plain 
pointing out of better ways than theirs to the very ends 
they seek. 

We have a better Gospel than any proclaimed since 
New Testament times, simpler, more real, more vitally 
related to the God who was and is in Jesus. It demon- 


THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 169 


strates how men can be saved by personal fellowship 
with the Living God. It demonstrates how the world ean 
be saved by seeking first the Kingdom of God and His 
righteousness. If only that Gospel were proclaimed 
with the same passion with which Peter the Hermit 
preached his infinitely smaller crusade; with the same 
kind of passion which evangelists of the eruder sort 
used to put into the preaching of their poorer Gospel. 
Christ would come to His own, and the world would 
eome back to the Father. 

One of the leaders of liberal Christianity has well 
said: 

The theories of atonement of Ireneus and of Anselm 
were serious attempts to account for the experience of 
salvation which men had with Christ and in His 
Church; but after all no theory is quite adequate to 
explain this supreme fact of human life. Perchance 
God became man that Jesus might show us the Father 
—Him whom Philip asked to see. When men behold 
Him, in the face and the life, in the words, the deeds, 
and the death of Jesus, they will arise and go to Him. 
Then they are saved—saved by infinite grace casting 
its arms around the hopeless sinner. 


Still does the test apply with the multitude—‘‘The 
God that answers by fire, let Him be God.’’ May God 
send upon the ministry of liberal Christians the fire of 
His Spirit, that the everlasting Gospel may be pro- 
claimed in our day in tones that will penetrate to the 
heart of the people! It is a great thing to know the 
truth that can make us free. But we need something 
more also. We necd heat as well as light. We need to 


170 LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY 


ery out to the God of all grace, who has brought us to 
the kingdom for such a time as this: 


“Grant us Thy truth to make us free; 
And kindling hearts that burn for Thee; 
Till all Thy living altars claim 
One holy light, one heavenly flame.” 


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